NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has completed five years in space, having mapped over 93% of the sky, discovered 329 new worlds, and thousands of other candidates. TESS uses four cameras to monitor large swaths of the sky called sectors for about a month at a time. Each sector measures 24 by 96 degrees, and the cameras capture a total of 192 million pixels in each full-frame image. During its primary mission, TESS captured one of these images every 30 minutes, but this has increased with time, and the cameras now record each sector every 200 seconds. TESS looks for the telltale dimming of a star caused when an orbiting planet passes in front of it to find exoplanets. TESS has observed hundreds of supernovae and thousands of other candidate transient events so far. New discoveries are waiting to be made within the huge volume of data TESS has already captured.
