The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

George R. Ricker, Joshua N. Winn, Roland Vanderspek, David W. Latham, Gaspar A. Bakos, Jacob L. Bean, Zachory K. Berta-Thompson, Timothy M. Brown, Lars Buchhave, Nathaniel R. Butler, R. Paul Butler, William J. Chaplin, David Charbonneau, Jorgen Christensen-Dalsgaard, Mark Clampin, Drake Deming, John Doty, Nathan De Lee, Courtney Dressing, E. W. Dunham, Michael Endl, Francois Fressin, Jian Ge, Thomas Henning, Matthew J. Holman, Andrew W. Howard, Shigeru Ida, Jon Jenkins, Garrett Jernigan, John Asher Johnson, Lisa Kaltenegger, Nobuyuki Kawai, Hans Kjeldsen, Gregory Laughlin, Alan M. Levine, Douglas Lin, Jack J. Lissauer, Phillip MacQueen, Geoffrey Marcy, P. R. McCullough, Timothy D. Morton, Norio Narita, Martin Paegert, Enric Palle, Francesco Pepe, Joshua Pepper, Andreas Quirrenbach, S. A. Rinehart, Dimitar Sasselov, Bun'ei Sato, Sara Seager, Alessandro Sozzetti, Keivan G. Stassun, Peter Sullivan, Andrew Szentgyorgyi, Guillermo Torres, Stephane Udry, Joel Villasenor

Published 2014-06-01, updated 2014-08-24Version 2

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.