TESS

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite searches for planets by measuring dips in the brightness of bright, nearby stars as planets pass in front of them.

Transit photometry: A method for detecting an orbiting object by measuring the light it blocks as it passes across its star. TESS detects planets through the small, repeated brightness drops measured by this method.
TOI-700: A nearby star system containing several transiting planets discovered by TESS. Its planets demonstrate TESS’s ability to find small worlds around nearby stars.
George Ricker: An astrophysicist who led the TESS mission’s development and scientific team. Ricker proposed and led the mission that became TESS.
Kepler field: The fixed region of sky continuously observed by NASA’s Kepler space telescope during its primary mission. Kepler watched one field deeply, unlike TESS’s repeated coverage across nearly the whole sky.
Full-frame image: An image recording the brightness of all stars in a camera’s field of view at one time. TESS uses full-frame images to monitor large star fields beyond its postage-stamp targets.
LHS 3844 b: A short-period, rocky exoplanet discovered by TESS orbiting a nearby red dwarf. This TESS discovery became a target for atmospheric and surface characterization.
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite proposal: The mission proposal that developed into NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. The proposal set out the bright-star, near-all-sky survey strategy used by TESS.
PLATO: The European Space Agency’s mission designed to find and characterize planets around bright stars. PLATO shares TESS’s bright-star emphasis but uses longer observations to study planetary systems.
Photometric aperture: A selected region of detector pixels used to measure an astronomical source’s brightness. TESS extracts stellar light curves from pixel regions surrounding target stars.
Pi Mensae c: A transiting exoplanet discovered by TESS orbiting the bright star Pi Mensae. Its bright host illustrates TESS’s strength in finding planets suitable for follow-up.

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