Artist conception of TESS
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space telescope for NASA's Explorers program, designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method in an area 400 times larger than that covered by the Kepler mission. It launched on April 18, 2018 at 6:51 PM Eastern Standard Time in Cape Canaveral, Florida. It is expected to find over 20,000 exoplanets, compared to about 3,800 exoplanets known at the time of its launch.
The primary mission objective for TESS is to survey the brightest stars near the Earth for transiting exoplanets over a two-year period. The TESS project will use an array of wide-field cameras to perform an all-sky survey. With TESS, it will be possible to study the mass, size, density and orbit of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars. TESS will provide prime targets for further characterization by the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as other large ground-based and space-based telescopes of the future.
Previous sky surveys with ground-based telescopes have mainly detected giant exoplanets. In contrast, TESS will examine a large number of small planets around the very brightest stars in the sky. TESS will record the nearest and brightest main sequence stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which are the most favorable targets for detailed investigations.
Led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with seed funding from Google, TESS was one of 11 proposals selected for NASA funding in September 2011, down from the original 42 submitted in February of that year. On April 5, 2013, it was announced that TESS, along with the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), had been selected for launch.
Planets discovered[]
- Main article: List of exoplanets discovered by TESS
TESS is expected to find over 20,000 extrasolar planets compared to about the 3,800 extrasolar planets that had been found at the time of its launch.