TESS, A New Satellite Designed At MIT, Joining The Hunt For Habitable Planets

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, better knows as TESS, is an MIT-led NASA mission to discover new planets like Earth. The satellite will picture the sky using four cameras on board, and at the end of its two-year mission will have surveyed 85 percent of the sky. TESS is expected to discover close to 50 planets for further study.

J.Kelly Beatty, space reporter and senior contributing editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. He tweets @nightskyguy.