Hundreds of candidate planets have been discovered so far in the data collected and released by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), with eight of them having been confirmed thus far by follow-up measurements. Three of the most unique, interesting exoplanets are illustrated here. (NASA/MIT/TESS)

Incredible First Discoveries From NASA’s New Exoplanet-Hunting Spacecraft: TESS

Kepler showed us that the Universe is full of planets around other stars. TESS is giving us our next great leap.

It’s been nearly a decade since NASA’s Kepler mission first launched. Beginning in 2009, the Kepler spacecraft watched hundreds of thousands of stars within our own galaxy, measuring the total amount of light output for each one and searching for any minuscule changes. By mission’s end, Kepler and its add-on mission, K2, had discovered thousands of new planets around stars beyond our own, including a significant number of Earth-sized, potentially habitable worlds.

If Kepler showed us that our galaxy was full of planets, then its successor mission, TESS — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — will reveal the transiting worlds around the closest stars to our own. If there’s an Earth-like world that passes in front of its parent star relative to our line-of-sight, TESS will reveal it. For the first time, we’ll be sensitive to the “holy grail” of planets right in our own backyard.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the TESS spacecraft lifts off on April 18, 2018, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. TESS is NASA’s successor mission to Kepler and K2, and is designed to find exoplanets around the closest stars to Earth. (GETTY)