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The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an all-sky transit survey , whose principal goal is to detect Earth-sized planets orbiting bright stars that are amenable to follow-up observations to determine planet masses and atmospheric compositions. TESS conducts conducted high-precision photometry of more than 200,000 stars during a its primary two-year mission with a cadence of approximately 2 minutes (and 20 seconds in the extended mission for select targets). These targets will be are read - out as postage stamps and be made available to the community as as target pixel files (TPFs) and calibrated light curves. In addition, the full image frame will be is read out approximately every 30 minutes (10 minutes . These in the first extended mission, 200 seconds in the second extension). These Full Frame Images (FFIs) will enable users to conduct photometry on any target within the 24x96 degree field-of-view.
In addition to these products, the TESS Input Catalog (TIC), and associated Candidate Target Lists (CTLs) are provided. The TIC is a catalog of every known, optically luminous, persistent object in the sky that extends down to the limiting magnitudes of its component catalogs. The TIC contains more than half a billion objects, and includes catalog information from Gaia, 2MASS, SDSS, ALLWISE, APASS, Tycho-2, UCAC4, LAMOST, RAVE, APOGEE, KIC and EPIC. The TIC allows users to:
- Look-up information, including coordinates and stellar properties, for any target the TESS mission produces a light curve of.
- Enable selection of the planet search stars, which includes consideration of background flux contamination levels.
- Provide stellar parameters, such as stellar radii, which the processing pipeline uses when calculating planet properties.
- Facilitate false positive detection, including background sources.
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For more information on the data products provided by the TESS mission, see the Data Product Overview section in this Archive Manual.
The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the public a variety of astronomical archives, with a primary focus on space-based telescopes operating in the optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared parts of the spectrum. MAST is located at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, USA. TESS is one of the missions that MAST supports, alongside other missions like the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, Kepler, and K2. MAST is an Affiliated Data Center for the Gaia mission, is the archive for the PanSTARRS project, and plays a leading role in the Virtual Observatory. Having TESS data co-located with more than 20 other missions spanning many decades and covering many parts of the electromagnetic spectrum allows for powerful and unique searches and analyses. See the Data Search Tutorials section in this Archive Manual for some examples.
Quick Links
TESS Homepage at MAST: http://archive.stsci.edu/tess/index.html
TESS Homepage at Goddard: https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html