NASA's TESS Rounds Up its First Planets, Snares Far-flung Supernovae

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has found three confirmed exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, in its first three months of observations.
February 13, 2019
NASA

TESS’s four cameras, designed and built by MKI and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, spend nearly a month monitoring each observing sector, a single swath of the sky measuring 24 by 96 degrees. The primary aim is to look for exoplanet transits, which occur when a planet passes in front of its host star as viewed from TESS’s perspective. This causes a regular dip in the measured brightness of the star that signals a planet’s presence.