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Space telescope data has underpinned 1.5 million+ scientific papers since 1990.
| Attribute | TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) NASA · 🇺🇸 Active · Last updated 2026-06-01Trust: Agency-primaryⓘ Last verified Remove × | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | ESA | NASA | NASA |
| Status | Active | Retired | Active |
| Wavelength band | multi | infrared | optical |
| Launch year | 2023 | 2003 – 2020 | 2018 |
| Orbit | Sun-Earth L2 point | Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit | High Earth orbit (P/2 lunar resonance orbit) |
| Mirror / aperture | 1.2 mas of [1] ↑ Largest | 0.85 mas of [1] | — |
| Mass | 2,160 kgas of [1] ↑ Heaviest | 950 kgas of [1] | 362 kgas of [1] |
| Wavelength range | 0.55–2.02 μm (optical VIS + near-IR NISP) | 3.6–160 μm (mid-to-far infrared) | 0.6–1.0 μm (red optical) |
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| Summary | ESA's dark energy explorer, launched July 1, 2023. Euclid will map the 3D distribution of ~1.5 billion galaxies across a third of the sky over 6 years, measuring dark energy and dark matter with unprecedented precision. Its first science-quality images, released February 2024, demonstrated exceptional optics. | NASA's infrared Great Observatory, operating 2003–2020. Best known for discovering the TRAPPIST-1 system of 7 Earth-sized planets, including 3 in the habitable zone (with ground telescopes). Ran out of cryogen in 2009 but continued 'warm mission' until retirement in January 2020. | NASA's all-sky transit photometry survey, successor to Kepler. TESS monitors nearly the entire sky in 27-day sectors using four wide-field cameras, targeting the 200,000 brightest stars nearest to Earth. Its targets are close enough for atmospheric follow-up by ground telescopes and JWST. |
All 9 major space telescopes with primary-source citations from NASA, ESA, STScI, and JPL. Pure URL state — bookmark or share the link and the comparison reproduces exactly.