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Space telescope, founded 2018

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

NASA's TESS has searched about 85% of the sky for planets crossing bright nearby stars. By May 2026 it had 7,931 candidate planets, 885 confirmed.

Location
Highly elliptical 13.7-day Earth orbit
Focus
Exoplanets, Stars, Astrobiology, Telescopes and missions
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In space

Highly elliptical 13.7-day Earth orbit

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA Explorer mission that looks for planets by the small dips in starlight they cause when they cross, or transit, their stars. It launched on April 18, 2018, on a Falcon 9 and flies a highly elliptical 13.7-day orbit around Earth. Its survey area is about 400 times larger than that of the Kepler mission, and it focuses on the brightest nearby stars, which makes its planets prime targets for follow-up.

Flagship instruments

  • An all-sky transit survey covering about 85% of the sky, concentrated on bright, nearby stars.
  • Mission timeline: primary mission to July 4, 2020; first extended mission to September 2022; second extended mission from September 2022 to November 2025.

Recent results

TESS continues the census started by Kepler, whose first results came in 2010 and which revealed features such as a gap in the sizes of small planets. As of May 3, 2026, TESS had identified 7,931 candidate exoplanets, 885 of them confirmed. In October 2026, four months of TESS data showed periodic variations around a white dwarf that suggest the first candidate “second-generation” planet, formed from a star’s death rather than its birth.

What to watch, 2026-2030

Our sources list no dated TESS milestones after the second extended mission ended in November 2025. The thing to watch is the follow-up: candidates around bright stars are what JWST and ground-based spectrographs need for atmosphere studies.

Why scientists are converging here

Exoplanets are the fastest-growing science category on arXiv, behind only instrumentation: astro-ph.EP listings for January to September 2026 are up 14.8% on the same months of 2025. In our Research Pulse count, “TESS” appeared in 269 abstracts from April to September 2026, up 15% on the previous six months, and “exoplanet atmosphere” rose 39%. Mentions measure attention, not discoveries, but TESS supplies many of the targets that attention is aimed at.

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