 Okay every month we also highlight an activity related to the webinar topic. This month we are looking at extra solar planets. Vivian White has this month's activity, Strange New Worlds, from the NSN Planet Quest Outreach Tool Cab. Hi everybody, it's great to see you out there. So I'm highlighting one of the activities on the Night Sky Network. You can find these in outreach resources. It's called Exploring Strange New Worlds and the whole right up is there with all of the handouts and this in this one it's really fun. You get to be a little bit creative and you imagine yourself as teams of scientists living on a planet orbiting a distant star and you are on the threshold of exploring your own planetary system for the very first time and you want to see what kind of planets are out there. So we are going to use tools like NASA has and it comes with this handout right here that talks about all the different ways that we explore planets and that is from an Earth telescope, a flyby, an orbiter, a probe, a lander or a rover, sample return or human and it tells you in our own solar system which planets have been explored in each of these ways. So this is part of the write-up and then it also has the instructions on the back of it but the basic idea is you can either make a strange new planet ahead of time or if you have a lot of time and some creative visitors they can make their own for display. I happen to have one right here that my kid just made. Alright so here's the deal really these would be about 10 meters away but you take a planet that you can't see very well from where you are and you pretend you put your hand out together and you pretend like you're looking at that planet. I don't know if you're gonna be able to get there. Something along those lines and you look you can look from there and you get to take three missions to this planet or there are many other ways of doing this. You can have it be monetary so maybe you only have ten million dollars and you have each different kind of mission costs a different amount. So you could either take a flyby which means one of your team of scientists will walk right by that. You could take pictures with your camera as you're going by and bring it back to the team of scientists to investigate to see which kind of mission you'd like to do next. Maybe you want an orbiter and then in that case you get to go around a couple of times or a lander or a probe especially that has a bigger atmosphere that can go down through the atmosphere. So there are many different ways to do it. There are lots of options for making it work in different amounts of time but it's a really fun activity that talks about how NASA explores our solar system and the idea of possibly exploring other solar systems at some point. Thanks so much. Oh and there is also you can print out an I explore the strange new world certificate which is kind of fun for your visitors to take home if they participate in this. So yeah that's the basics of it but the whole write-up has lots of other ideas to go on there as well. So enjoy. Alright thank you very much Vivian. And now for our featured program. Nicole Colon is a National Physicist and the Deputy Director of the Tess Science Support Center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Please welcome Nicole Colon. Hello thank you very much for having me here this evening. I am going to share my screen so you all can see my presentation. Okay and please let me know if you cannot see it. Looks great. Okay great. Alright so I'm here today to talk to you all about the Tess mission. So Tess stands for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and this is one of these missions that well you know I'll talk about it more tonight but it's one of these that involves a lot of people working at a lot of different institutions so I was introduced as the Deputy Director for the Tess Science Support Center which is managed at Goddard where I am and however the the main mission the principal investigator of the mission is located at MIT in Boston and there's also a whole science office for tests located at MIT and Harvard all up in Boston and Goddard we manage the project and we offer science support which I'll talk about a little more later and then also there is going to be a data archive that anyone can access hosted at the Space Telescope Science Institute website and so I'll point you to those locations a bit later on towards end of my talk but I want to start off by talking about transits because this is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and you can't talk about Transiting Exoplanets without first talking about transits themselves so this is a movie showing a transit of a planet and this is actually a transit of Venus that was observed in 2012 so we're seeing Venus pass in front of the surface of our Sun from our point of view here on Earth but when we look for exoplanets you know that are outside our solar system we don't actually resolve the planet like we do with Venus but this gives you an idea of what we're looking for when we look at a transit we want to see how much light is blocked by a planet and so this in a different form you can see this illustration where all we're basically looking for is to measure the brightness of a star over time and so we're with a transit method we can measure dips in brightness and this tells you basically how big the object is that caused that dip in brightness and for example you know we have a Jupiter sized planet which is relatively large which would cover some fraction of a star's surface from our point of view and compared to an Earth where you see just a tiny little black pinpoint compared to Jupiter so it's a much smaller amount of light from the star that's blocked and so that comes into play a little bit later in terms of why Tess was was built in the first place so I'll come back to that in a bit but before I get into Tess they you really have to talk about the history of exoplanets in general to understand what Tess is going to bring to the table and in this case we need to talk about the Kepler mission so Kepler launched in 2009 and it operated its prime mission until 2013 so it's about four years long and this mission was was designed for a specific purpose so it you really wanted to look at one part of the sky for four years and determine how many stars or sorry how many planets there are on average around the star and what fraction of stars in our galaxy harbor small Earth sized planets so Kepler was designed to basically determine how common planets are and how common small planets are specifically and so the history of Kepler comes about when you well you really see the impact of Kepler I should say comes about when you compare exoplanet discoveries over time so this was back in 1989 we had just one exoplanet known up there's a blue point up there and this this diagram is showing the radius of a planet the size of a planet relative to Earth and you can see Jupiter Neptune Earth's lines are marked so you know for reference this one planet was several times the size of Jupiter back in 1989 that was all we had fast forward till 2009 mark before the Kepler launch and we have several tens maybe even a hundred exoplanets known at that time and they cover you know all kinds of different sizes now and a range of orbital periods but these are kind of the easy targets that ground based surveys could discover so a lot of large planets that are easier to detect because they cause deeper dips in light or they cause a more massive wobble or Doppler effect on the star which is another method to find a planet but so when Kepler launched after four years you get this amazing bounty of planets shown in yellow now so if I flip back to the previous slide I can see there we go then you see this and then you see the big bounty from Kepler pop in and this bounty of yellow points has told us many things but one of the most important things is that it's told us yes you know planets are common because we found so many of them with Kepler but also we found a lot of small planets that are between Earth and Neptune so that big yellow clump between one and four times the size of Earth so we found a lot of planets that it's you know we never have seen before because all we have in our solar system is Earth and Venus are similar size and then you jump up to Neptune in Uranus so we have nothing in between Earth and Neptune but yet Kepler's telling us that these size planets are just insanely common so that was you know revolutionary and so in total we have now all these different populations of exoplanets that we know of from these small rocky planets that are you know one or two times the size of Earth and the ones that are a bit larger than that like Neptune size they're considered to be ice giants like Neptune or potentially water ocean worlds that are just have a bunch of like water on their surface and then we have populations of these giant massive planets that are either really close to their star so they're hot Jupiters or we have cold gas giant plants like our own Jupiter and then also we have things that we call lava worlds which are you know small rocky planets but they're orbiting so close to their stars like within one or two days orbital periods you know compared to our own year orbital period that these things are just so insanely close to their star that they are either disintegrating or affected such that they are like molten lava essentially on their surface so you know we have a huge diversity of planets that we know about now so ultimately from all this we can say we now believe that planets actually outnumber stars in the galaxy so we know that there's billions and millions of stars but now we know that planets are just as common and in fact we know that many stars have multiple planets like the Sun does which makes sense but also on average you know any star you look up at the sky on average has at least one planet so there's just you know again this amazing bounty of planets that have been discovered so given that you might say well why do we need any other missions after Kepler you know Kepler's discovered so much but there's a few reasons for needing new exoplanet missions and first before I get to Kepler I have to say a few words about the K2 mission because K2 is basically acting as like a pathfinder for tests and it came about after Kepler so the Kepler mission came or ended in 2013 but the K2 mission started up in 2014 and it's using the same Kepler spacecraft to do observations just like Kepler did and look for things like transiting planets but the reason that the K2 mission came about was because the Kepler spacecraft effectively broke so you can only point accurately in two axes of motion instead of three so instead your third axis of motion is balanced by solar pressure and so because of this special configuration you're forced to look in the ecliptic plane of the sky which is illustrated on this chart here and you see a bunch of patches that are indicating the different parts of the sky that the K2 mission has now observed compared to the single patch that Kepler observed before but K2 only observes for 80 days at a time each patch while Kepler observed one field for four years straight basically so K2 has observed a lot of different fields now compared to Kepler but it's observed them each for much shorter amount of time but still you can see from all these numbers that I've turned up here that the K2 mission it's been going for about four years now it has observed a lot of different stars and galaxies and in fact this chart is at a date so if I update it it's we're no longer at about 200 confirmed planets but we have over 300 confirmed planets from K2 and several seven almost 800 candidate planets that are awaiting confirmation via various techniques and so the point of K2 was to kind of expand on Kepler's legacy and use a spacecraft that's still you know reasonably functional but now also by design it's been able to look at a bunch of cool stars so I'm I highlight that there's been 50,000 cool stars observed but again this chart is old so that number has actually gone up a lot and the reason why that's important is you want to observe cool stars because they tend to be smaller than the Sun and that actually makes it easier to find small transiting planets around them because it's a ratio of transit depths of the transit depth is a ratio between the planet size and the star size and so really this K2 mission essentially has acted as a pathfinder for tests because it started the survey of small stars to look for planets around them and that's really what tests was designed to do so tests saw you know people who developed tests they saw how successful Kepler is and was and is and they said okay you know that's great now we know planets are common so what can we do next to improve upon this well now we can search for planets around the closest stars that are bright and small and you know nearby relatively nearby to us compared to Kepler but let's do it over the basically the whole sky so this way we can sample you know not just one part of the galaxy or even just a few parts along the cook's egg well let's sample as much of the sky as we can search for planets and so that's why test this design and you can see on the on the slide here that the Kepler footprint field of view is still shown and the test field of view is shown for comparison on top of that Kepler a footprint and I'll show you really just how big the test footprint is to show you how much of the sky surveys at a single time and as another kind of example of the difference between Kepler and tests Kepler observed you know again towards one part of the sky but it sampled a distance stars out to a distance of about 3,000 light years or so test is instead going to survey the smaller closer in circle close to us in our solar neighborhood of about 300 light years away up to 300 light years so you know it's going to observe all the closest stars and then many that are further away but you know much closer than what Kepler surveyed in general and it's in total going to survey about 85 or a bit more than 85% of this guy compared to Kepler again just observing not even 1% of this guy so these are you know some some significant differences but this tells you why these missions are so complimentary and so this slide also really demonstrates the reason why we want to target some of these smaller cooler stars because again if you look at the Sun and you look at for planets around the Sun using the transit method you can see the size of that dip in the red curve is you know pretty small and then when you go to that same size planet around a small star you get a much deeper dip in brightness and that just makes it so much easier to find planets around small stars and you know that's why again the K2 mission having success at finding a lot of planets around small stars has shown us further that you know tests will be successful for sure so tests actually you know I talk about the development a test but it did launch so it's up in space now which is exciting it launched on April 18th on a SpaceX Falcon 9 and my picture that that I personally took because I was there at the launch just shown on the left for my view on the beach and it was actually outside the Saturn by visitor center this was from Kennedy Space Center and you know it was just a picture perfect day picture perfect launch it was really fantastic to be there and you know the cool thing was if you're watching it on the SpaceX webcast you could see tests literally in space there's the payload coming off the little test spacecraft coming out of the rocket once it's actually been up in space so you know it's it's again was just super exciting to see that and it was a great day because we got to you know be in Florida without our colleagues and take a few vacation days but also this all these people in this picture were or have been or are currently involved in tests in some way so whether they're they helped develop the mission or you know are part of the team that's going to help find planets from the mission a lot of these people were able to make it in person so it was really great to get a group photo and again I had I did me there so you can spot me in the crack but yeah it was a great great day so you know now it's up in space which is fantastic and it it's actually finished commissioning so it started science observations and so what it's doing right now is it's looking at different parts of the sky of course as I'll show you on the next chart but it's has four cameras that are observing at the same exact time simultaneously so you can see here how big that that field of use bands for the cameras reach and so there's four individual cameras that cover some parts of the sky and every 30 minutes test is taking an image so each camera is taking a complete image of its field of view and so you're collecting data basically every 30 minutes for that entire new highlighted region that all the cameras are seeing however there's little circles pointing out some specific stars basically and what this is showing is that there are a certain number of stars in in this strip that are observed and have data collected for every two minutes so at a more rapid cadence and this that that two-minute special cadence is really designed to enable additional planet discovery by sampling the the the stars brightness and a more frequent you know timing so that way you can get basically higher precision data and get more information from your transit light curves and also it's used the two-minute canons is used for other science as well so even though not every star is observed at two minutes you still get that whole swath at 30 minutes which really allows you to do a you know so much science is going to be insane so and I'll show you on on further slides here you know just how much data this is going to be and so what tests is doing so that was just one slice I showed you before and what it's doing is it's staring at one slice for 27 days and taking an image every 30 minutes for most stars or some stars at every two minutes but it's going to actually do that you know for one slice for 27 days we call it a sector and then it's going to step around the sky and it's going to do the southern ecliptic hemisphere see if I can replay this yeah the southern ecliptic hemisphere it's going to do that in its first year of operations and then it's going to flip over and survey the northern ecliptic hemisphere in its second year of observations just as shown in this movie so with this you're getting you know again more than 85 percent of the sky sampled and there's red regions highlighted at the end of this this little graphic because they're because of you know the sky is curved you're getting overlap at certain regions of the sky and so what this means is showing you on a static diagram here is that some parts of the sky will be observed for 27 days only as shown in blue and some will be observed at a much longer amount of time so up to 351 days for those northern on pole or northern and southern pole regions and that's really great because you can basically look for some really high value planets because we call them high value because they're one of the longer orbital periods you can look for planets that for example are possibly in the habitable zones of their stars so all these planets that were really close to their stars they're way too hot to have liquid water but if you observe a star long enough you might be able to see you know planets that are further away and have temperatures that could support liquid water on their surface so that's you know one of the really siding regions of parameter space that tests will will cover is looking for planets in at least those you know parts of the sky for for potential habitable zone type of studies and another neat thing about tests is that it's on this highly elliptical orbit around the earth and so you see in this graphic that tests is observing for actually it observes so I said it observes each part of the sky for 27 days it's actually observing each for 13 point you know something days and then it whips around and it down links 13 worth days worth of data to earth and then I continues observing that same part of sky for another 13 days and it's the the reason it's in this orbit well there's a couple reasons and one of them is that it's it's pointing in the anti sudden direction so that way you know the sun is always at the opposite side so it can always have you know nice dark skies to look at basically but also that means that on earth we're able once we get the data down and we can try to look for new planets and things we can basically observe the same parts of the sky that tests is observing if we get the data down fast enough and process it best enough so within a couple weeks of downlink we basically hope to have planet candidates out so that we can then go follow up to try to measure masses and things like that so you know it's it the orbit offers a good opportunity for rapid observations to look at any of the new discoveries that tests is made and so this is a simulated image of one part of what tests will see and I'll show you a real image shortly but I want to show you this for scale first because this all the the individual white splotches are stars and this is just one degree on the sky and if you look now relative to tests as full cameras that little that this entire green square is just one part of one ccd one one part of one detector and each individual camera has four detectors so this is now the field of view from a single camera and remember the strips the sectors have four cameras that are reserving simultaneous that one time so this kind of gives you you know the idea of the scale of the test field of view and to put it into even better perspective I love this analogy metaphor whatever you want to call it the entire Orion constellation would fit inside the field of view from a single test camera so if you imagine you know how big Orion is on the sky that's how big one camera how much sky one camera from test sees at a time so it's really you know so much data and now so this though is an actual image from tests this was released back in May so launch in April and this came out about a month later it's a first test image from part of from one part of one of the four cameras so again this wasn't even a full camera is worth you know a picture but it again shows you you know just the hey that the cameras are working which is great that's always what we always want to see and be you know the density of stars that we have the amount of data we're going to have is just incredible and I pointed out one particular star of interest beta centauri and this is taken of that region of the sky so now you can recognize hey no tests observe this back in May and tests so tests officially started science operations at the end of July so about a month ago now but right before it started science observations if there was another release of kind of a teaser of data from the mission and what it can do beyond looking at stars for planets and in particular this is showing it's a movie I'll start in a second but it's showing you actually a part of two of the detectors so there's a gap the solid gray shows a gap between detectors that are that are on a giving the camera and you see a really bright object on the left there and that is actually a comment that tests happen to observe during its commissioning period when it was testing out observations and you'll notice that once I start the movie you'll notice a few other things or features about this this movie but you know I'll just start the movie and I'll let you see I'm gonna it's gonna keep looping so first you'll see that a the comet is moving as it should be which you know it's just exciting that test captured it and you also see that hopefully you can see this on your screen that there's a tail of light you know that that is waving about it looks all wispy and it's changing over the course of the these observations which were there's a time stamp in the corner and it's you know several hours worth of data at least and you can see you know amazingly test was able to capture this comet and see its tail in action and also you'll see a few other things moving around there's another bright point if you just stared at long enough I could stare at this all day but if you stare at it long enough you'll see other objects moving that are solar system objects and you'll see other objects that are blinking in and out like from white to black and so this was a this image is what we call a difference image and basically the black and white linking objects are showing you what is changing in in these objects so some of these are variable stars that you know have significant changes in brightness over time and you're seeing them link in and out you're also seeing an effect the other streaks are in effect actually Mars was in the field at this time and so you're seeing like kind of a reflection effect from Mars in those other bright streaks on the image in the movie so again this movie is online tests the test dot MIT.edu website has links to this film and the Goddard website also has links but it's just I could stare at it all day but I won't do that now I wanted to talk about a few more things first is that you know okay so those are just two sneak peeks basically of of what tests has released so far in terms of you know what it's done during its commissioning period and how it's gotten everything sorted out so that it could start science as I mentioned at the end of July and it did start science and so what that means now is that it's going it's working on you know doing its survey of the southern ecliptic hemisphere and then in January of 2019 right now the working day is January 25th 2019 there's going to be the first actual data release from tests and so that will contain the first four sectors of data so the first four 27 day chunks and that's going to be publicly available to everybody to me to you everybody at the same time and after that release they the plan is that there's going to be a more rapid release of data so they're basically taking now the first six months of science to look at the data and you know get the data validate it and make sure they have all their ducks in a row and everything you know they understand any quirks in the data so that they can explain it to users and then once that's all sorted out they'll be able to have a more rapid data release in the future and so we'll probably get to the point where we're having data released every couple months at least for you know a next couple years for tests as it completes a southern survey and then the northern survey and then after that so that the northern survey will be done by so this timeline is you know shift a little bit that'll be done by mid 2020 or so and they're going to be proposing MIT will be proposing for an extended mission and so what that extended mission will consist of is to be determined but you know we're hoping that we can continue to use a spacecraft to collect data because it's actually doesn't require that much fuel to operate and its orbit is very stable so it could in theory operate and function well or a couple decades so you know we're hoping that that we have some extended mission that comes out and can continue exoplanet surveys or other things but that remains to be seen right now but in any case I think I'm gonna skip these slides and just basically point out that all the data so again this is going to be the images of from each sector that are taken every 30 minutes and then up several select stars like these will be thousands tens of thousands of stars observed at every two minutes all that data is going to be at this archive and as I mentioned before it'll be accessible you know at come January 2019 to everybody and so you can go on there and you can see the you can look at the pixel level data you'll be able to see light curves generated by the project for the various data and you'll be able to play with this at your leisure whatever you want to do since it's open to the public and in addition so the the office that I work for is as I mentioned before it's a test science support center at Goddard and you know the the main test science mission out of MIT is to find exoplanets which is what we all want but our our goal at Goddard too is to also enable all kinds of science and so we funded several scientists to do non-exoplanet science with tests but also to do a different variety of exoplanet science so there's there's all kinds of things that we're supporting and so there are a few different tools that we have to help people with data analysis and we have a help desk for example so if anyone is interested in getting you know playing with the data once it comes live they can access us via this website and so I just wanted to wrap up here with a couple more slides and show you you know okay all that all said and done what might tests actually find and there have been very simulations of the types of planets tests might find and this is one version where this is showing the planet radius as I showed earlier on the on the vertical scale but now the horizontal scale showing distance from us so the much closer stars are you know at 10 parsecs or even closer and so the folks have simulated that tests will find all the orange circles so it's going to fill in basically as we talked about a lot of planets around nearby stars compared to blue which is the Kepler which observe much more distant stars and it's going to find many small planets just like Kepler did because we know they're common but also the size of the signal or the size of the circles that are shown are telling you basically how good these targets are going to be to do studies of their atmospheres in the future and so you see a bunch of big black circles around like 10 parsecs so these are planets discovered by other surveys that are phenomenal targets for studying the atmospheres but tests is going to fill in this gap with you know even more small planets and and some that are even closer some around some of the closest stars and so tests is going to just provide a huge enough bounty that we can do statistical studies of exoplanet atmospheres which we can't really do right now we just don't have enough of them that are amenable to atmospheric characterization and so in this way you know ultimately we want to know where do we point the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope that's going to be a powerhouse for studying exoplanet atmospheres you know what are the best planets to study with this telescope and tests is going to help answer that question test is our finderscope essentially so this is to scale showing you how tiny test is you know compared to James Webb and it literally could be a binoscope for for it so we're really excited about what tests will find to enable all kinds of future studies and so I'll just end on this slide you know say you know wrap it up say well tests will find you know a lot of benchmark planets that we will study for decades and you know we can use all kinds of telescopes to study test planets because test planets are going to be around nearby bright stars so we can use also the currently operating Hubble telescope and the future James Webb telescope we can do all kinds of things to better understand these planets and ultimately you know better characterize atmospheres and determine how many might be in how well zones you know how many might potentially have liquid water these are things that we want to try to answer and so I will leave it at that and say you know I'm happy to take any questions that about tests if you want to get involved again with looking at the data yourself that you know I'll say stay tuned for some of that with the bulk data release coming up in January and yeah I'll leave it at thank you all right well thank you so much Nicole this is fantastic I learned a whole lot there's a lot more to this mission that I I didn't know about and so I really appreciate this before we get to the first question I want to remind everyone that if you do have a question please put it in the Q&A window rather than the chat window will have a better chance of finding it that way so let's see let's go back Scott asked a question can sunspots perhaps many be mistaken for an exoplanet and might this I guess there's a follow-up question here so I'll let you answer that one and then there's a second question yeah back up here yeah so this that's a perfect question actually so for example on the endorph that's pictured illustrated here you know you see a bunch of dark spots that are sunspots or star spots and just as our sun has varying levels of sunspot activity and so it is true that some of these spots can mimic transiting planets but the good thing is that a transit of a planet let's say test discovers all these planets and you know some of them might actually be false planets to the sunspots what we can do is once we know where and when to look from tests we can use other telescopes to look at these planets as well but at different wavelengths of light and so basically we can compare then the test transit depths which is kind of like a reddish optical filter we can compare that with let's say bluer optical or further infrared observations to see if there's any difference in the transit depths and that will tell you in bulk if it's actually some solid opaque body of a planet or if it's instead a star spot contrast that we're seeing so basically we a lot of this all these planets will require additional observations to follow up but test makes it easy on us on the front end by finding you know telling us where and when to look so yeah so we'll hopefully be able to mitigate a lot of the the star spot false detections I think there was another Scott had a kind of a second question here and I think it had to do with this idea of false positives something about mistaking the rotation of the star for the orbiting planet and I know that there's variations other than sunspots that you know lead to differences in luminosity yeah yeah so stellar stars are not as they're more active than we would like them to be when we're when we're trying to look for planets especially small planets but again if we can kind of do or we can do the same thing to mitigate any stellar effects by following up and looking at different wavelengths of light and also if we measure a mass you know we can combine that measured mass with the measured transit depth and which gives us the radius and say okay is this actually you know a valid planet or is the mass just way off you know is it can we even detect it you know if it's not a planet then we shouldn't really see any type of Doppler wobble signal that would be of a planetary level especially because we're targeting small stars so yeah there's there's a lot of different things that we will need to do to mitigate stellar activity and star spots and all that but there are definitely plans in place for that. Ken asks the cameras are taking pictures every 30 minutes and just maybe to confirm what you said of the same part of the sky or is each new image a slightly different part of the sky due to the orbital motion of the spacecraft. Yeah the orbital motion it actually so it's able to stay pointed well enough or as far as we know definitely precisely enough so that it is staring at at the same exact part of the sky so like a single blue strip is staring at the same exact part of the sky for 27 days in total and then you purposefully step and stare at the next one you know every 27 days so you because the pointing of the spacecraft is so precise if it wasn't precise we would have a problem but all signs have shown that it's it's very stable. Okay well this is this is kind of a follow-up Stewart asked due to the fact that tests will observe its areas over relatively short spans of time relative to Kepler anyway is it likely that it will miss some possible transits is there some way to extrapolate from the actual number observed transits the number that potentially would have been seen. Yeah so there's a couple ways to answer this too so the so the parts of the sky where it will observe for only 27 days like all the blue strips in this image means that preferentially will only easily identify the shortest period planets the closest in planets but there will be cases where we detect maybe you know one transit in that 27 days and you can actually get a rough approximation of the period from even a single transit so then we could use other telescopes to try to confirm a second transit and so on so that's part of what we can do another part is that yeah the so tests is it is going to miss a lot of the longer period planets in these regions so one idea for the extended mission is to you know maybe go back and then just repeat this so that you can build up the baseline and get even more data so that's one option to find longer period planets but the good thing even though it's only observing for some you know some of these stars in 27 days is that for small stars the habitable zone is much closer in so for the coolest stars the habitable zone is like around a couple weeks of an orbital period compared to our one year so in theory you could still find planets around really cool stars that are possibly in their habitable zones even in the 27 day period and so that's since you know tests really wants to just find a bunch of small planets it doesn't really care about their period too much but it still has a potential to find a lot of cool ones that might have liquid water okay cook asked a question and we might need to get a little bit of clarification or maybe you can answer because I think that there would be two ways says what magnitude can test detect and I wasn't sure if he was meaning absolute magnitude of them or the apparent magnitude that we would see from here I'm guessing the latter yeah so it's easier to answer the parent magnitude for sure I would have to think about that yeah the apparent magnitude tests is is designed again I said but this kind of reddish optical filter so it's sort of peek towards these cooler M-door stars that have their black-body light peaks in the infrared but in any case we can detect maybe about to with a decent amount decent level of precision planets around stars of 15 16th magnitude in this kind of like a i-band filter you know reddish optical so with more data you could go fainter but again test wants to really just test is designed to do all the bright stars you know because that's that's what's easiest for us to to characterize them every which way so so yeah so but we could reasonably do after 15th or 16th magnitude parent magnitude can I think I heard the answer to this one embedded in that answer but Ray asked what wavelengths are test yeah so it is a I said a reddish optical filter it's it's a single just a single wavelength basically like a single broadband filter so it doesn't observe it more than one wavelength but yeah it's you know what actually I have a backup slide on that I think about it it should be yeah perfect right here so it's from about 600 to a thousand-ish nanometers so you can see the Kepler bandpass is the light gray lighter gray and that one was slightly bluer wavelength coverage and so test is optimized you know slightly to the red red or wavelengths all right so David asks I think that this is a little bit related because it you know it depends on all those things how many stars do you anticipate are within the reach of tests within that 300 light-year radius hmm that is a great question so I know that we people have simulated finding thousands of planets I have let's see I have one more backup slide somewhere so except I skim hold on so so there's a lot I'm trying to bring up here we go these are all the stars within just 80 light years of the Sun and you know the idea is that we will survey in the end more stars than we can imagine in the 30-minute images but the two-minute images we're observing oh gosh on the order of tens of tens of thousands every two minutes and so that will get us to at you know several hundred planets you know out to apparent magnitudes of 16 or so for the star okay well kind of you know we're kind of staying with the kind of planets that we can you know perhaps detect with the Scott asks longer period planets are more distant from the star is it the method of test kept her bias towards finding planets orbiting close to the star yeah it definitely is just because you need the right angle to see it transit in the first place so that means in theory or a priori you are biased towards shorter period planets but that's why so that's why it's very difficult to find long period planets from the ground because you know we have day night cycles and that really impacts our ability to find anything longer than like even two weeks I think might be the longest planet from the ground the oral period but then Kepler has shown us that you know if we stare long enough we will find long period planets and with tests you know we will find again more of these shorter period planets around at least in the parts of sky observe for just 27 days but you know since we're staring at enough stars in the sky we will just buy you know default of everything that's been discovered so far we will be able to find a lot of planets at a range of orbital periods but still definitely biased towards shorter ones so I will tell really okay well we're running close to the end we're gonna do one more question here and I we apologize for some really great questions that we're not quite getting it getting to but Michael asks when examining a transit and determining planet size how do you decide whether you're looking at a large planet close to a star so it looks relatively smaller or a small planet closer to test so it looks larger okay yeah so the ideas that we are so far away even the closest stars that we're serving we're still so far away from them that the relative distance of the planet to its star actually doesn't impact how we measure the radius at all so it's it's I guess if you want to call it a geometric effect just that we we ourselves and tests orbiting around earth is are so far from the stars that we just don't see any effect from the stellar and planet is a planet distances between relative to each other so it's not like how how we have the planets in our solar system that we can tell the apparent size changes you know when it's closer to earth these planets are just too far away we don't see that effect at all well why don't you go ahead and stop sharing okay I'm glad that we that you kept sharing because he had some really great slides there yeah that ended up being fairly important to answering the question so that's all for tonight everyone thank you so much to our speaker Nicole Coulomb you know this is a wonderful webinar and this will be available on the night sky network website in the outreach resources section and this will also be posted on the night sky network YouTube channel in the next few days so you could be looking for those and again Nicole thank you so much this is wonderful thank you so much for sharing with us thank you