NASA’s Planet Finder TESS Will Study 85 Percent of Sky - How?

NASA’s Planet Finder TESS is like a super smart camera that takes pictures of the sky to find new planets.

Imagine you're playing hide and seek in a huge park. You can only see part of the park at once, so you move around to spot everyone hiding. That's what TESS does, it moves around in space to look at different parts of the sky.

TESS is like a detective who looks for tiny shadows on stars. When a planet passes in front of a star, it blocks some light, and that’s like a shadow. By watching these shadows, scientists can tell there's a planet nearby, kind of like how you know someone is hiding behind a tree when the light from the sun gets blocked.

TESS doesn’t look at the whole sky all at once, but it does take turns looking at different parts. It’s like having a really big map of the sky and coloring in most of it, about 85 percent, to find new planets hiding in the dark.

Each time TESS moves, it sees more of the sky, just like you would if you walked around your park to find all the people hiding!