The TESS Mission Target Selection Procedure
Abstract
We describe the target selection procedure by which stars are selected for 2-minute and 20-second observations by TESS. We first list the technical requirements of the TESS instrument and ground systems processing that limit the total number of target slots. We then describe algorithms used by the TESS Payload Operation Center (POC) to merge candidate targets requested by the various TESS mission elements (the Target Selection Working Group, TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium, and Guest Investigator office). Lastly, we summarize the properties of the observed TESS targets over the two-year primary TESS mission. We find that the POC target selection algorithm results in 2.1 to 3.4 times as many observed targets as target slots allocated for each mission element. We also find that the sky distribution of observed targets is different from the sky distributions of candidate targets due to technical constraints that require a relatively even distribution of targets across the TESS fields of view. We caution researchers exploring statistical analyses of TESS planet-host stars that the population of observed targets cannot be characterized by any simple set of criteria applied to the properties of the input Candidate Target Lists.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2109.02665,
title = {The TESS Mission Target Selection Procedure},
author = {Michael Fausnaugh and Ed Morgan and Roland Vanderspek and Joshua Pepper and Christopher J. Burke and Alan M. Levine and Alexander Rudat and Jesus Noel S. Villaseñor and Michael Vezie and Robert F. Goeke and George R. Ricker and David W. Latham and S. Seager and Joshua N. Winn and Jon M. Jenkins and G. A. Bakos and Thomas Barclay and Zachory K. Berta-thompson and Luke G. Bouma and Patricia T. Boyd and C. E. Brasseur and Jennifer Burt and Douglas A. Caldwell and David Charbonneau and J. Christensen-dalsgaard and Mark Clampin and Karen A. Collins and Knicole D. Colón and Nathan De Lee and Edward Dunham and Scott W. Fleming and William Fong and Aylin Garcia Soto and B. Scott Gaudi and Natalia M. Guerrero and Katharine Hesse and Matthew J. Holman and Chelsea X. Huang and Lisa Kaltenegger and Jack J. Lissauer and Scott Mcdermott and Brian Mclean and Ismael Mireles and Susan E. Mullally and Ryan J. Oelkers and Martin Paegert and Andras Pal and Elisa V. Quintana and S. A. Rinehart and David R. Rodriguez and Mark Rose and Dimitar D. Sasselov and Joshua E. Schlieder and Lizhou Sha and Avi Shporer and Jeffrey C. Smith and Keivan G. Stassun and Peter Tenenbaum and Eric B. Ting and Guillermo Torres and Joseph D. Twicken and Andrew Vanderburg and Bill Wohler and Liang Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.02665},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
15 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in PASP