VOA常速英语:NASA’s New Planet Hunter Ready to Launch

Engineers have been assembling and testing TESS, since its arrival at NASA’s Space Center.Its mission is to locate exoplanets that orbit a star, similar to the way the Earth orbits the Sun and see whether these planets can support life. To find these new worlds TESS will look for dips in the brightness of stars indicating planets passing in front of them.
自从抵达NASA太空中心以来，工程师们一直在组装和测试TESS。它的任务是寻找围绕恒星轨道的系外行星，类似于地球围绕太阳轨道运行方式的行星，以及这些行星是否有生命存在。为了发现这些新的世界，TESS会在行星经过它的运行轨道时观测它们的明暗度变化。

“It is going to survey nearly the entire sky, looking at hundreds of thousands of stars up to millions of stars, looking for new planets orbiting these other stars.”TESS will divide the sky into sections, looking at each slice for 27 days, before switching to the next area.“And it is done, we will have surveyed 85 percent of the sky for science of exoplanets.”TESS will be building on the mission of the Kepler space telescope that launched in 2009, but will soon run out of fuel. Kepler discovered about 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, but they are far away. TESS will spend about two years searching for new worlds closer to our solar system, planets orbiting stars close enough and bright enough, so earthbound astronomers can study them in more detail.
它将勘察几乎整片天空，观察成千上万甚至数以百万计的恒星，寻找着这些围绕其他恒星旋转的新行星。TESS会把天空划分成几个部分，每个部分观察27天之后才会转战下一部分。我们将会对宇宙中百分之八十五的地外行星进行经科学检测。2009年发射的开普勒太空望远镜燃料即将耗尽，TESS将在它的基础上继续进行勘察任务。开普勒发现了大约2600颗已被证实的系外行星，但它们都很遥远。TESS将花费大约两年时间寻找更接近太阳系行星的新世界，这些行星的轨道距离地球足够近且足够亮，以便地球天文学家可以更详细地研究它们。

“We can do follow-up measurements such as getting the mass of the planet and looking at the atmosphere and searching for things like water vapor and even maybe signs of life on the planet.”“Tess is the mission that is going to detect some of those planets that we first dream of going to in a realistic way.”
我们可以做后续测量，比如获得地球的质量，观察大气，寻找水蒸气等物质，甚至可能是地球上的生命迹象。TESS的任务是前往那些此前推测可能存在生命的理想星球去探测，去证实。

Scientists hope to one day send robots to these planets for further exploration.
科学家希望有一天能够将机器人发射到这些行星从而进行进一步的探索。

I’m faith Lapidus VOA news.
VOA记者费思。