Transiting Exoplanet Survey (TESS) Resumes Normal Operations

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey (TESS) began its return to normal operations on Thursday, Oct. 13, at around 6:30 p.m. EDT. Engineers successfully powered up the instrument, and the spacecraft resumed its regular fine-pointing mode.

The team expects that TESS will resume science observations later today, and all science data stored on the spacecraft will be downlinked at the next opportunity.

TESS entered into safe mode on Oct. 10 following a reset of its flight computer. The team will spend the next several days analyzing data to determine the cause.

Launched in 2018, TESS has been scanning almost the entire sky looking for planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets. TESS has also uncovered other cosmic phenomena, including star-shredding black holes and stellar oscillations. Read more about TESS discoveries at www.nasa.gov/tess.