Will the TESS telescope be much better than the Kepler telescope?

Question

I would like to know please whether or not the TESS telescope will be much better than the Kepler one.

Thanks.

Rather than one being better than the other, I would say that they have different targets.
Whereas Kepler focused on a specific area of the sky, TESS will cover an area 350 times bigger.

Also, most of the exoplanets discovered by Kepler are far away; TESS will focus on stars within 300 light years away.

For more info, feel free to watch this video I recently made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL3RiFKfZj3pv1ZqpFxuZinoGtUGEOankw&v=7bsxlG-rh1E — The Exoplanets Channel, Apr 14 '18 at 21:49
Looking up NASA fact sheets for TESS and Kepler, the literature ( https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/Kepler-presskit-2-19-smfile.pdf) says that Kepler could detect brightness changes down to 20 parts per million. For perspective they say that an Earth-like planet orbiting a sun-like star (I assume at an Earth-like orbit) creates a brightness change of 84 ppm. By contrast, the one I found for TESS (https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/documents/TESS_FactSheet_Oct2014.pdf) claims 200 ppm with a system noise ratio of 60 ppm. I'm not calling this an answer since I may be misinterpreting. — Jack R. Woods, Apr 20 '18 at 03:49

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 14 '18 at 21:50

Rather than one being better than the other, I would say that they have different targets.

Whereas Kepler focused on a specific area of the sky, TESS will cover an area 350 times bigger.

Also, most of the exoplanets discovered by Kepler are far away; TESS will focus on stars within 300 light years away.

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