All About TESS - the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

Dave Latham, CfA

On Friday April 5, TESS was selected as an Explorer investigation by NASA. TESS will use an array of telescopes to perform an all-sky survey to discover transiting exoplanets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, in orbit around the nearest and brightest stars in the sky. Its goal is to identify terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. These planets will be the best targets for follow-up observations to determine planetary masses with facilities such as the HARPS spectrographs (North and South) and G-CLEF on the GMT, and characterization of their atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope. George Ricker of MIT is the Principal Investigator, and the team includes scientists from the CfA.