🛰️ Mission
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.
- Launched
- 18 April 2018, 8 years ago
- Working for
- 8 years so far
- Built by
- NASA
- Sees
- Ordinary light
- Where it is
- A stretched orbit around Earth, tuned by the Moon’s gravity to stay stable
- Best known for
- Hunting planets around the nearest, brightest stars, so other telescopes can study their air
Did you know?
- Kepler studied one patch of sky in detail. TESS sweeps almost the whole sky, a strip at a time.
- Its four cameras take a picture of the same strip every half hour for 27 days before moving on.
What it showed us
TOI-700 d
An Earth-sized world found by NASA’s TESS space telescope.
More NASA photos of TESSStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
GALEX
Ten years of the ultraviolet sky.