It's taken more than six years of development, but a new imaging system forthe Palomar Observatory's 200-inch Hale Telescope finally started capturing images last month, and promises to aid significantly in thesearchfor planets outside our solar system (otherwise known as exoplanets).
Dubbed the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS), this new space telescope will one-up Kepler with the ability to perform an all-sky survey (an area 400 times larger than previous missions) to searchfor transiting exoplanets, with an eye towards planets comparable to Earth in size.