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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 high-precision photometry of more than 200,000 stars during a two-year mission with a cadence of approximately 2 minutes. These targets will be read-out as postage stamps and be made available to the community as target pixel files (TPFs) and calibrated light curves. In addition, the full image frame will be read out approximately every 30 minutes. 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:

  1. Look-up information, including coordinates and stellar properties, for any target the TESS mission produces a light curve of.
  2. Enable selection of the planet search stars, which includes consideration of background flux contamination levels.
  3. Provide stellar parameters, such as stellar radii, which the processing pipeline uses when calculating planet properties.
  4. Facilitate false positive detection, including background sources.

The CTLs are lists of targets provided by different working groups that can be considered for short-cadence observations.  Multiple CTLs are available from lists such as exoplanet search, guest investigator program, asteroseismology, and director's discretionary time (DDT).  The final set of targets to be observed at short cadence is a subset of all these CTLs, determined via a merging process led by the Science Processing and Operations Center (SPOC) at NASA Ames??.

TESS Homepage at MAST: http://archive.stsci.edu/tess/index.html

TESS Homepage at Goddard: https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html

TESS Homepage at MIT: https://tess.mit.edu

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