NASA TESS unveils most complete sky mosaic

NASA said on May 13 that its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, had released its most complete view of the sky yet, filling gaps left by earlier passes and overlaying the positions of worlds the mission has found. The new mosaic is built from 96 observing sectors and shows where TESS had identified confirmed and candidate exoplanets by the end of September 2025. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio said the image includes 679 confirmed exoplanets and 5,165 candidates, shown as colored dots across the sky. The release gives researchers and the public a single map of where TESS has concentrated some of the richest exoplanet hunting fields. ### How complete is this new TESS sky view? NASA said the mosaic is TESS’s “most complete view of the starry sky to date,” because it fills in gaps from previous observations rather than simply reissuing earlier all-sky images. The agency’s visualization page said the final frame used in the mosaic was captured by the end of September 2025, at the close of TESS’s second extended mission. (science.nasa.gov) The 96 sectors in the mosaic reflect how TESS surveys the sky in wide strips, watching one sector for about a month at a time with four cameras. NASA’s TESS support pages describe a sector as an observing period of roughly 27 days, and say the spacecraft’s cameras repeatedly collect full-frame images that are later assembled into science products. ### What exactly is plotted on the image? (science.nasa.gov) NASA’s visualization says blue dots mark confirmed exoplanets and orange dots mark candidates identified by TESS as of September 2025. The same description says the glowing band across the center is the plane of the Milky Way, and the Large Magellanic Cloud appears near the lower edge of the image. Nearly 6,000 dots appear across the mosaic because NASA combined both confirmed planets and still-unconfirmed candidates into one sky map. (heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov) That count is consistent with the agency’s published breakdown of 679 confirmed TESS exoplanets and 5,165 candidates in the mosaic itself. ### How does that compare with the live TESS planet count now? The NASA Exoplanet Archive said on May 14 that TESS had 893 confirmed planets and 7,931 project candidates in its current running totals. (svs.gsfc.nasa.gov) Those archive figures are higher than the numbers shown on the mosaic because the image is a snapshot tied to detections logged by the end of September 2025, while the archive updates as new confirmations and candidates are added. That timing difference is an inference based on NASA’s dated description of the mosaic and the archive’s separate update dates. NASA’s archive also said the broader confirmed exoplanet count across all missions stood at 6,287 on May 14. TESS is one contributor to that larger total, but the new image is specific to worlds found or flagged by the TESS mission. ### Why does TESS map the whole sky this way? NASA’s TESS overview says the mission was designed to conduct a near all-sky survey in optical light and to find transiting planets around bright nearby stars. (exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu) The same overview says those brighter host stars are intended to support follow-up work, including measurements of planet masses and atmospheric composition. Rebekah Hounsell, a TESS associate project scientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in NASA’s release that “over the last eight years, TESS has become a fire hose of exoplanet science.” NASA said the new map helps show the scale of that output in one image. (exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu) ### Where can readers and researchers see the mosaic now? (heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov) NASA Science published the release and image on May 13, and NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio posted the visualization entry with the same data and scene description. The Exoplanet Archive, operated for NASA by Caltech/IPAC, continues to post updated counts for confirmed planets and TESS project candidates separately from the static mosaic. (science.nasa.gov) As of May 15, 2026, the next step for readers is straightforward: NASA’s image pages host the mosaic now, while the NASA Exoplanet Archive continues updating the live TESS totals as additional candidates are validated or added. (science.nasa.gov)