The dark side? Again?
> China ... plans to land on Luna’s dark side later this year
Have we really not figured this out yet?
(Maybe someone will reply, telling me that he (or she) "could care less." Please do. Care less that is.)
NASA’s exoplanet-spotting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has successfully manoeuvred around Earth’s moon. TESS is headed for an orbit that’s elliptical and inclined to Earth. The ellipse allows TESS to squirt data back to Earth from its 108,000km perigee, an altitude that keeps it well clear of the cluttered ~30, …
The different perspective it shoots suns out should also pick up candidates that probes in the ecliptic plane do not.
Something something, TESS is in a highly inclined orbit (~40degrees from the ecliptic plane).
NASA Explanation which includes an excellent diagram comparing TESS's field of view with that of the James Webb Telescope.
This means that sections of the sky are not "eclipsed" by the Sun, Earth or Moon for long periods. Obviously they'll always appear in it's sphere of view, but compared to Earth or LEO-based telescopes, you don't have half the sky blocked out for 6 months of the year (or rather, you've got a different section of sky blocked out, which gives you better time-sequencing on areas we haven't had year-round visibility of before).
More significantly because it's shooting above and below the ecliptic plane it gives you a "top-down" and "bottom-up" view on the solar system, so you can see "over and under" planets and moons and get a better view of asteroids and other objects which might only appear to have marginal/slow movement when viewed from the ecliptic, but from "above" and "below" you can see them streaking across the system, which is further enhanced by regular re-imaging of the same sector every few days or weeks.
The upshot is that compared to JWST (which has tunnel vision and can focus on a small area pretty much continuously but to the exclusion of all else), TESS can sample most of the sky every 27 days, the vast majority every 50-180days, with just a small region that only gets coverage once every 351 days.
have read.
"The different perspective it shoots suns (potential extra solar plants transits) at should also pick up candidates (for extra solar planets) that probes in the ecliptic plane do not."
Apologies for the quite intense level of confusion that paragraph may have caused.
I've seen it reported as 5,000 miles in 'Murican coverage, so 8,000km makes sense.
8km - that's plenty of clearance... (most of the time)
Back in the days of yore (before the Mun had topography) I manually parked a spacecraft in a 1km orbit. Recently, for old times' sake, I tried again and started with a "safe" 5,000-meter orbit. That's when I found new versions of Kerbal Space Program had given the Mun mountains of up to 6,000 meters height, and that vigorous lithobraking maneuvers still produced lots of rocket confetti.