Artist conception of TESS and a system of transiting exoplanets (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched on April 18th with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Space Launch Complex, Cape Canaveral. TESS will help the search for exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, with a highly elliptical orbit stabilized by our Moon. This new satellite will continue the work done by the Kepler Space Telescope but using modern search patterns and optics that will survey an area approximately 350 times larger. During its primary mission, TESS will survey more than 200,000 target stars, viewing large parts of the sky for 27 days at a time.