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 | NASA |
| Status | In Development | Active | Retired |
| Wavelength band | infrared | optical | optical |
| Launch year | 2027 | 2018 | 2009 – 2018 |
| Orbit | Sun-Earth L2 point | High Earth orbit (P/2 lunar resonance orbit) | Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit |
| Mirror / aperture | 2.4 mas of [1]Same aperture as Hubble but 100× wider field of view ↑ Largest | — | 1.4 mas of [1] |
| Mass | ~4,200 kgas of [1]Estimated; uses repurposed NRO mirror donated to NASA ↑ Heaviest | 362 kgas of [1] | 1,052 kgas of [1] |
| Wavelength range | 0.48–2.3 μm (optical + NIR) | 0.6–1.0 μm (red optical) | 0.43–0.89 μm (optical) |
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| Summary | NASA's next flagship astronomy mission. Roman's 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument (WFI) has Hubble-equivalent resolution but covers 0.28 square degrees per pointing — 100× wider than Hubble. Its 5-year primary mission will census dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanet populations across the Milky Way. | 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. | 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. |
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.