NASA’s new planet-hunting machine, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is racking up scores of alien worlds.

Less than a quarter of the way through a two-year search for nearby Earthlike worlds, TESS has already discovered 203 possible planets, according to George R. Ricker, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the leader of the project. Three of those candidates already have been confirmed as real planets by ground-based telescopes.

On Monday afternoon, Dr. Ricker and his colleagues issued a progress report on humankind’s latest search for friends or at least neighbors. The mission, they said at a meeting of the American Astronomical Association in Seattle, was well on track to its official goal of finding and measuring the masses of at least 50 planets that are no larger than four times the size of Earth.

“The torrent of data has already begun,” Dr. Ricker said.

All of these worlds would be located within 300 light years from here, our cosmic backyard, and close enough to be inspected by future telescopes, such as NASA’s ever-upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, for signs of atmospheres, habitability and, perhaps, life. These worlds are the next frontier beyond our own solar system for answering the haunting question of whether life, in whatever form it might be recognized, has arisen elsewhere in the universe.