Unlike Kepler that cataloged mostly faraway stars, TESS will focus on easy-to-study exoplanets in Earth’s astronomical neighborhood – covering G, K and M-type stars with optical magnitudes brighter than Mag 12. TESS is hoped to leave a legacy of a large catalog of the nearest and brightest stars hosting exoplanets to keep the scientific community busy for years to come. Stars observed by the 360-Kilogram spacecraft will be 30 to 100 times brighter than those observed by Kepler which will make follow-on characterization of exoplanet atmospheres and other properties much easier. Under the TESS Project, MIT is responsible for the scientific instrument, Orbital ATK builds and operates the spacecraft, NASA Goddard provides project management, systems engineering and mission assurance, and Science Center responsibilities like data analysis and archiving are handled by a partnership between MIT, the Kavli Institute, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and NASA’s Ames Research Center.Īlthough much smaller and with a lighter budget than NASA’s Kepler exoplanet hunter, TESS will deliver not only complementary measurements but expand Kepler’s catalog. A number of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone around their host will likely be detected by TESS and scrutinized with current and future ground- and space-based assets to study their atmospheres. TESS will detect a large variety of rock-and-ice planets in orbit around a diverse set of stellar types and cover a broad range of orbital periods. Over the course of its mission, TESS will monitor the brightness of approximately 200,000 stars and is expected to detect more than 1,500 transiting exoplanets including a large sample of around 500 Earth-sized and Super Earth planets. To that end, TESS is considered an extremely valuable precursor mission to the James Webb Space Telescope, assembling a list of observation targets for further study by the upcoming flagship mission. With TESS, detection will be possible for a large number of small planets around the brightest stars in the sky. Previous all-sky surveys using ground based telescopes were mostly limited to the detection of giant exoplanets that are usually not suitable for harboring life. TESS will perform a mission of at least two years – operating a package of four Wide Field Cameras tasked with obtaining the first-ever spaceborne exoplanet all-sky survey to a) detect exoplanet candidates and b) collect valuable information such as mass, size, density and orbit of a large number of currently known and unknown exoplanets with special focus on those in the habitable zone around their host stars. Operating from a highly elliptical high-Earth orbit, The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is an expoplanet space telescope operated by NASA and MIT to conduct a comprehensive survey of the brightest stars near Earth for the detection of exoplanets through the transit method. TESS – Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Photo: Orbital ATK

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