High school intern discovers new planet at Maryland’s NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

WASHINGTON (WJLA) � A high school student interning at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt this past summer discovered a bit more than how the employees there take their coffee. He discovered a planet.

Wolf Cukier’s job, after he finished his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA�s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

TESS has four cameras, which each take a full-frame image of a patch of the sky every 30 minutes for 27 days, NASA says. Scientists use the observations to generate graphs of how the brightness of stars change over time.

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