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 | Retired | In Development | Active |
| Wavelength band | infrared | infrared | optical |
| Launch year | 2003 – 2020 | 2027 | 2018 |
| Orbit | Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit | Sun-Earth L2 point | High Earth orbit (P/2 lunar resonance orbit) |
| Mirror / aperture | 0.85 mas of [1] | 2.4 mas of [1]Same aperture as Hubble but 100× wider field of view ↑ Largest | — |
| Mass | 950 kgas of [1] | ~4,200 kgas of [1]Estimated; uses repurposed NRO mirror donated to NASA ↑ Heaviest | 362 kgas of [1] |
| Wavelength range | 3.6–160 μm (mid-to-far infrared) | 0.48–2.3 μm (optical + NIR) | 0.6–1.0 μm (red optical) |
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| Summary | 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 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. |
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.