TESS is following in the footsteps of NASA's Kepler space telescope, which has discovered about 70 percent of the 3,700 known exoplanets to date. But unlike Kepler, TESS will hunt for worlds around the sun's nearest neighbor stars, and some of the satellite's finds will be close enough for the $8.8 billion James Webb, which is scheduled to launch in 2020, to study in detail.

The visualization tool is part of NASA's "Exoplanet Travel Bureau," which also offers free posters of alien worlds for download.