Special Presentation: NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

April 28, 2019, 3 p.m.

Presentation by Shane Hynes, NASA TESS Mission

The Kepler spacecraft has discovered over 2000 planets around other stars. But Kepler looked at only about ¼ of 1 percent of the whole sky. The TESS spacecraft will survey almost the entire celestial sphere over its two year mission. This presentation will describe what exoplanets are, how TESS looks for them, what the TESS spacecraft looks like and some of the recent results.

Speaker Bio

Shane Hynes was the Mission Systems Engineer for TESS satellite and had overall responsibility for the technical success of the mission. The first mission Shane worked on, Ariel 6, launched in 1979, since then he has designed electronics for the Hitchhiker program, led a team flying a Ultra-Violet photometer on five Space Shuttle flights (STS-34, 41, 43, 45, 56), been a systems engineer on the TRMM, FUSE, EO-1 missions and been the Mission Systems Engineer for STEREO before becoming the Mission Systems Engineer for TESS mission. Shane has worked at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center since the mid-1980's, initially as a contractor and for the last ten years as a civil servant.

Shane has degrees from Cambridge University, UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University.

Total Duration: 45 minutes, plus Q&A
Audience: 9 yrs and older, and adults
(NOTE: Not of interest to very young children)

For more information, see Space Telescopes

Doors open: 2:30 p.m. Show begins: 3 p.m.

Our capacity is 58 seats. We set aside 20 seats to accommodate those who arrive without a reservation, so if the show is sold out you can still try to attend by arriving close to 2:30 p.m. However, although we will do whatever we can to seat all comers, there is no guarantee of admission without a reservation.