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The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA mission launched in 2018 to search nearly the entire sky for planets transiting bright, nearby stars. With four small wide-field cameras, TESS has enabled the discovery of more than 1,000 planets, with thousands of additional candidates awaiting further investigation. The host stars of TESS planets are remarkably diverse, spanning much of the main sequence and including evolved stars such as low-luminosity red giants and even a white dwarf. TESS has brought the planetary mass-radius relation into sharper focus, revealed that near-resonant orbits are very common in young planetary systems, shed new light on the origins of hot Jupiters, and identified some of the best targets for atmospheric studies with JWST. Beyond exoplanets, TESS has created a voluminous time-domain record of the sky, enabling investigations of stellar variability, stellar interiors, astronomical transients, and objects in our own Solar System. I will review the history and design of TESS, highlight some of its most intriguing scientific discoveries, and discuss what lies ahead for this versatile space telescope.

BIO

Josh Winn is a professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. His research focuses on the properties, formation, and evolution of planets around other stars. He is particularly interested in the architecture of planetary systems: the sizes, masses, shapes, and orientations of planetary orbits, and what they reveal about the histories of planetary systems. He was a Participating Scientist in NASA's Kepler mission and helped design the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), for which he serves as a Co-Investigator. He received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 2001, held postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and served on the MIT physics faculty before joining Princeton in 2016. He is the author of The Little Book of Exoplanets (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Host: Wei Zhu