The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
Abstract
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly elliptical 13.7-day orbit around the Earth. During its two-year mission, TESS will employ four wide-field optical CCD cameras to monitor at least 200,000 main-sequence dwarf stars with I = 4-13 for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Each star will be observed for an interval ranging from one month to one year, depending mainly on the star's ecliptic latitude. The longest observing intervals will be for stars near the ecliptic poles, which are the optimal locations for follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope. Brightness measurements of preselected target stars will be recorded every 2 min, and full frame images will be recorded every 30 min. TESS stars will be 10-100 times brighter than those surveyed by the pioneering Kepler mission. This will make TESS planets easier to characterize with follow-up observations. TESS is expected to find more than a thousand planets smaller than Neptune, including dozens that are comparable in size to the Earth. Public data releases will occur every four months, inviting immediate community-wide efforts to study the new planets. The TESS legacy will be a catalog of the nearest and brightest stars hosting transiting planets, which will endure as highly favorable targets for detailed investigations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1406.0151,
title = {The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite},
author = {George R. Ricker and Joshua N. Winn and Roland Vanderspek and David W. Latham and Gaspar A. Bakos and Jacob L. Bean and Zachory K. Berta-Thompson and Timothy M. Brown and Lars Buchhave and Nathaniel R. Butler and R. Paul Butler and William J. Chaplin and David Charbonneau and Jorgen Christensen-Dalsgaard and Mark Clampin and Drake Deming and John Doty and Nathan De Lee and Courtney Dressing and E. W. Dunham and Michael Endl and Francois Fressin and Jian Ge and Thomas Henning and Matthew J. Holman and Andrew W. Howard and Shigeru Ida and Jon Jenkins and Garrett Jernigan and John Asher Johnson and Lisa Kaltenegger and Nobuyuki Kawai and Hans Kjeldsen and Gregory Laughlin and Alan M. Levine and Douglas Lin and Jack J. Lissauer and Phillip MacQueen and Geoffrey Marcy and P. R. McCullough and Timothy D. Morton and Norio Narita and Martin Paegert and Enric Palle and Francesco Pepe and Joshua Pepper and Andreas Quirrenbach and S. A. Rinehart and Dimitar Sasselov and Bun'ei Sato and Sara Seager and Alessandro Sozzetti and Keivan G. Stassun and Peter Sullivan and Andrew Szentgyorgyi and Guillermo Torres and Stephane Udry and Joel Villasenor},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.0151},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
accepted for publication in the new, peer-reviewed SPIE Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems (JATIS)