TESS completes primary mission

[notFritzArgelander]

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-nasa-plan ... ssion.html

[helicon]

Wow, TESS has identified over 2,100 exoplanet candidates, pending further analysis of the data.

[ThinkerX]

Hmmm....

Kepler discovered a greater number of planets than TESS despite surveying a smaller area.

Kepler got the low hanging fruit?

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.e ... etail.html

[notFritzArgelander]

Hmmm....

Kepler discovered a greater number of planets than TESS despite surveying a smaller area.

Kepler got the low hanging fruit?

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.e ... etail.html

Kepler stared at a limited FOV. That's easier to do. An (almost) all sky survey is necessary to complement the sampling issues from staring.

[Gfamily]

Hmmm....

Kepler discovered a greater number of planets than TESS despite surveying a smaller area.

Kepler got the low hanging fruit?

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.e ... etail.html

Kepler stared at a limited FOV. That's easier to do. An (almost) all sky survey is necessary to complement the sampling issues from staring.

TESS also only had 30 days looking at each region of the sky, so could only expect to find planets with orbit periods less than half that across most of the sky.

I think it's fair to say though, that the initial expectation was that it would have discovered more by now.

[Gfamily]

I'm a big fan of TESS though, particularly its orbit around the Earth that was designed to both avoid obstruction by the Moon, but also be stabilised by being synchronised with the Moon's orbit.

The high eccentricity of the orbit meant that it could do its fortnightly data downloads to Earth using just a fraction of the power that would have been needed if it had a circular orbit.