In April, TESS went into safe mode twice; the first on 8th and the next on 23rd April. The culprit of the first incident remains a mystery, but engineers found that the second safe mode was associated with faulty depressurization of the spacecraft propulsion system. Fortunately, the MIT team overseeing TESS was able to restore full functionality by manually depressurizing the system on May 3.
Despite recent setbacks, TESS has been a great success. The aircraft, launched in 2018, exceeded the goals of its main mission in 2020 and its first extended mission in 2022. In fact, it recently made a big splash by discovering its first “rogue planet” that is not connected to any star system. The discovery was made using a clever technique that measures the subtle bending of starlight caused by the passage of a stray planet.
Source: Ferra
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