TESS satellite

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is a space telescope for NASA's Explorer program, designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method in an area 400 times larger than that covered by the Kepler mission. It was launched on 18 April 2018, atop a Falcon 9 launch vehicle and was placed into a highly elliptical 13.70-day orbit around the Earth. The first light image from TESS was taken on 7 August 2018, and released publicly on 17 September 2018. Over the course of the two-year primary mission, TESS was expected to ultimately detect about 1,250 transiting exoplanets orbiting the targeted stars, and an additional 13,000 transiting planets orbiting additional stars in the fields that TESS would observe. As of 5 April 2021, TESS has identified 2,601 candidate exoplanets, of which 122 have been confirmed so far.