The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a planned
space telescope for NASA's Small Explorer program, designed to
search for extrasolar planets using the transit method. Led by
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with seed funding from
Google, TESS was one of 11 proposals selected for NASA funding
in September 2011, down from the original 22 submitted in
February of that year. On April 5, 2013, it was announced that
TESS, along with the Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR
(NICER), had been selected for launch in 2017. Mission concept
Once launched, the telescope would conduct a two-year all-sky
survey program for exploring transiting exoplanets around nearby
and bright stars. TESS would be equipped with four wide-angle
telescopes and charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors, with a
total size of 192 megapixels. Science data will be processed and
stored for three months onboard, and only data of interest will
be transmitted to Earth for further analysis. Data collected by
the spacecraft a