Pick up to 4 telescopes to compare side-by-side. State lives in the URL — share the link and the comparison loads exactly as you left it.
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 | NASA | NASA | ESA |
| Status | Retired | Active | Active |
| Wavelength band | optical | optical | multi |
| Launch year | 2009 – 2018 | 2018 | 2023 |
| Orbit | Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit | High Earth orbit (P/2 lunar resonance orbit) | Sun-Earth L2 point |
| Mirror / aperture | 1.4 mas of [1] ↑ Largest | — | 1.2 mas of [1] |
| Mass | 1,052 kgas of [1] | 362 kgas of [1] | 2,160 kgas of [1] ↑ Heaviest |
| Wavelength range | 0.43–0.89 μm (optical) | 0.6–1.0 μm (red optical) | 0.55–2.02 μm (optical VIS + near-IR NISP) |
| Key missions |
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| Summary | The mission that proved planets are abundant throughout the galaxy. Kepler monitored 150,000+ stars continuously for 4 years, finding that most stars host planets. A reaction wheel failure in 2013 ended the primary mission; the repurposed K2 mission (2014–2018) found 1,000+ additional planets before fuel ran out. | 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. | 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. |
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.