NASA has explored the space beyond Earth and our solar system with spacecraft like Voyagers 1 and 2, and how we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets with space telescopes like Kepler and TESS.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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TechTranscript
00:00For the longest time, space seemed like a big, nearly empty place, and we were really
00:07only familiar with our home, Earth.
00:11But as we learned more, we realized there was actually a lot out there, including planets
00:16orbiting the Sun and even other stars.
00:20To get to these more distant worlds, though, it helps to start thinking of space as a bunch
00:24of nested bubbles.
00:26Our first bubble is the magnetosphere, Earth's invisible magnetic field that protects us
00:32from high-energy particles and radiation from the Sun, allowing life as we know it to develop
00:37and thrive.
00:39The next bubble, just past the solar system, is the heliosphere, the edge of the Sun's
00:45influence where the particles and fields of interstellar space take over.
00:51The two Voyager spacecraft have left this bubble, and are our first interstellar spacecraft.
00:57It took Voyager 1 35 years, and it took Voyager 2 41 years to travel this far.
01:04The next stop is our nearest stars.
01:07The Alpha Centauri system, at just over 4 light-years away, is close by cosmic standards,
01:12but it would take either Voyager about 75,000 years to get there at current speeds.
01:18We clearly need to use other tools to look for worlds that far away.
01:23Enter Kepler, a space telescope that radically changed our understanding of planets outside
01:28of our solar system, also known as exoplanets.
01:32In finding thousands of new planets, Kepler showed that there are more planets in our
01:37galaxy than there are stars.
01:40But Kepler looked at only a small fraction of the sky, and many of the planets it discovered
01:45are too far away to study in much further detail.
01:49And that brings us to TESS, our newest planet hunter.
01:53The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite works like Kepler, and over the next two years
01:58it will scan almost the entire sky.
02:01By looking at closer and brighter stars, TESS will find and measure the sizes of dozens
02:07of small, nearby planets, best suited for detailed investigation by powerful telescopes
02:13on the ground and in space, like the future James Webb Space Telescope.
02:19And by doing that, we might finally begin to answer the question of whether Earth is
02:24alone, or whether there are worlds out there like our own, small and rocky, covered in
02:31oceans and dense clouds, or even, possibly, capable of supporting life.
02:44Beeping
02:47Beeping
02:50Beeping