At a total cost of $337 million, the washing-machine-size spacecraft is built to search the nearest, brightest stars for signs of periodic dimming. TESS is expected to reveal 20,000 planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, Nasa said. Nasa predicts that TESS could find more than 50 Earth-sized planets and up to 500 planets less than twice the size of the Earth. TESS will survey far more cosmic terrain than its predecessor, Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope which launched in 2009, taking in some 85 percent of the skies. "That is about 20 times what the Kepler mission was able to detect."

Source: Bangkok Post April 16, 2018 14:48 UTC