Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an MIT-led NASA mission to spend two years discovering transiting exoplanets by an all-sky survey.

TESS has four identical, highly optimized, red-sensitive, wide-field cameras that together can monitor a 24 degree by 90 degree strip of the sky. By monitoring each strip for 27 days and nights, TESS will tile the southern hemisphere sky in the first year and the northern hemisphere sky in the second year. TESS is scheduled for launch no earlier than March 2018, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and will go into a very eccentric, inclined orbit around the Earth.

TESS will discover thousands of planets and is further specially designed to find a pool of small planets transiting small stars. TESS will deliver fifty rocky planets with measured masses for a lasting legacy. The TESS data has no proprietary time and the data segments will become public four months after observations.