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Anti-aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

A NASA spacecraft built to spot alien worlds has completed its first two years of work, and the tally is in: the mission hauled in 2,241 new exoplanet [space.com] candidates for scientists to study.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS [space.com]) launched in April 2018, designed to spend two years poring over most of the sky. Each month, the spacecraft turns to a new strip of stars and stares, watching for the characteristic dips in brightness caused by a planet crossing between star and telescope. In a new catalog, astronomers offer a detailed view of a host of planet candidates the spacecraft identified in its first two years of work.

"The exciting thing is to look at the map of TESS exoplanets as a kind of to-do list — with 2,000 things on it," Natalia Guerrero, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the paper's lead author, said in a NASA statement [nasa.gov].

And, more to come?

TESS is still observing; NASA extended the mission [space.com] for another two-year stint, which will keep the spacecraft in business until September 2022. And scientists will be working with the existing data, including the new catalog, for years to come.

"Now the community's role is to connect the dots," Guerrero said. "It's really cool because the field is so young, there's still a lot of room for discovery: those 'Aha' moments."

The catalog is described in a paper [arxiv.org] uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.org on March 23.

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