Talking Points for Opener TESS is NASA’s newest planet hunter searching for exoplanets - planets outside our solar system.  TESS launched on April 18, 2018 to begin its quest for new worlds. The mission is searching for tell-tale drops in the brightness of stars, known as transits, which indicate an orbiting planet that regularly crosses in front of its parent star.  TESS is expected to find thousands of new planets ranging from small, rocky worlds to giant gas planets. The wide variety of planet types that TESS could find will showcase the diversity of planets in our galaxy.  TESS is the follow on to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which retired in November after a very successful 9-year mission. What’s particularly exciting about TESS is that it’ll be looking for planets around stars much closer to us, typically closer than 300 light years away. The stars that TESS monitors will also be much brighter than those observed by Kepler, making it much easier for other telescopes to perform follow-up observations to learn more about the planets TESS finds. We’re looking forward to seeing how TESS works with upcoming missions, like the James Webb Space Telescope, to find the next era of new planets, including some that could even support life.  Since TESS is monitoring a large swath of the sky for a month straight--virtually without blinking--it can also act as a watchdog for other interesting or exciting changes in the stars and galaxies that it sees, such as supernova explosions, which are the death cries of massive stars. NASA funds a vibrant program for Guest Investigators to get even more science out of the TESS data. Next we’ll hear from the TESS Principle Investigator, George Ricker…