National Aeronautics and Space Administration

TESS Spacecraft

DESIGNED FOR PHOTOMETRIC STABILITY

The TESS mission will be based on Orbital's LEOStar-2 platform, a flexible, high-performance spacecraft for space and Earth science, remote sensing and other applications. LEOStar-2 can accommodate various instrument interfaces, deliver up to 2 kilowatt orbit average payload power, and support payloads up to 500 kilograms. Performance options include redundancy, propulsion capability, high data rate communications, and high-agility/high-accuracy pointing. TESS will be the eighth LEOStar-2 based spacecraft built for NASA. Previous missions include SORCE, GALEX, AIM, NuSTAR and OCO-2 spacecraft.

Orbital ATK LEOStar-2 spacecraft bus:

• 3-axis stabilized pointing, with ≤3 arc-sec performance
• Two-headed star tracker; 4 wheel zero-momentum system
• 433W single-axis articulating solar array
• Passive thermal control
• Mono-propellant propulsion system
• Ka-band 100 Mbps science downlink

+ Orbital ATK TESS Factsheet