The exoplanets TESS sees will be observed later using upcoming telescopes like NASA's James Webb Telescope, set for launch in 2020, or the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) now under construction in Chile.

NASA delays James Webb telescope, the next Hubble, until 2020.

More Earth-like exoplanets found hiding in Kepler data.

Finally, humanity gets the tools needed to find life on other planets.

NASA, SpaceX to launch spacecraft to find another Earth.

'And I think that was really the scientific check box that we needed for NASA to say, 'OK, TESS makes a lot of sense now.' It'll enable not just detecting planets, but finding planets that we can thoroughly characterize after the fact.' 'Kepler went up, and was this huge success, and researchers said, 'We can do this kind of science, and there are planets everywhere,' said TESS team member Jennifer Burt, an MIT postdoc. Over the next several years, Kepler added to the known exoplanet catalog thousands more planets, including hundreds of rocky worlds, dozens of super-Earths and a number of worlds in the habitable zone. That was the year the Kepler Space Telescope launched, the world's first space telescope designed with planet-spotting in mind.

Only a handful of the planets discovered before 2009 could be considered terrestrial or vaguely Earth-like. Over the next 15 years or so, less than 500 planets would be added to the list, most of them gas giants hundreds of times more massive than Earth. The first confirmation of planets beyond our solar system didn't come until the mid-1990s. Then, an hour after launch, the satellite's solar panels were unfurled for the first time so it could begin firing up all systems and start a long testing phase. The landing is the 24th successful return to Earth for a Falcon 9.Ībout 48 minutes after launch, TESS and its four wide-field cameras designed to watch for planets passing in front of their host stars separated from the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on the droneship 'Of Course I Still Love You' in the Atlantic Ocean about eight minutes after launch.

Spacex launches nasa planet-hunting s