Abstract: The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is NASA’s wide-field optical astrophysical observatory exploring the bright and time-variable sky. Since its launch in 2018, TESS has discovered over 500 confirmed exoplanets and over 6000 additional candidates await confirmation. Dozens of these planets’ atmospheres have been or soon will be explored by the Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes. By providing high-cadence, high-precision, and long-baseline light curves, TESS also fuels major advances in stellar astrophysics including asteroseismic constraints on fundamental stellar properties and understanding the interplay of magnetic activity, rotation, and age by detecting flares and rotational modulation of stars in a wide variety of evolutionary states and environments. TESS also catches dozens of high energy transients each year, probing the rapidly evolving physical conditions of explosions during phases often missed by other optical facilities while they are still searching for or slewing to the transient. In the standard TESS survey strategy, most areas of the sky are observed continuously for 27 days and are re-observed every two years. In response to community input, the next three years of the TESS survey will employ new strategies to perform longer contiguous observations of a large fraction of the sky, unlocking new opportunities for detecting long-period planets, measuring stellar rotation periods and ages, and extending the light curves of optical transients.
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