The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
Creators: name: Ricker, George R.
name: Winn, Joshua N.
name: Vanderspek, Roland
name: Latham, David W.
name: Bakos, Gaspar A.
name: Bean, Jacob L.
name: Berta-Thompson, Zachory K.
name: Brown, Timothy M.
name: Buchhave, Lars
name: Butler, Nathaniel R.
name: Butler, R. Paul
name: Chaplin, William J.
name: Charbonneau, David
name: Christensen-Dalsgaard, Jorgen
name: Clampin, Mark
name: Deming, Drake
name: Doty, John
name: De Lee, Nathan
name: Dressing, Courtney
name: Dunham, E. W.
name: Endl, Michael
name: Fressin, Francois
name: Ge, Jian
name: Henning, Thomas
name: Holman, Matthew J.
name: Howard, Andrew W.
name: Ida, Shigeru
name: Jenkins, Jon
name: Jernigan, Garrett
name: Johnson, John Asher
name: Kaltenegger, Lisa
name: Kawai, Nobuyuki
name: Kjeldsen, Hans
name: Laughlin, Gregory
name: Levine, Alan M.
name: Lin, Douglas
name: Lissauer, Jack J.
name: MacQueen, Phillip
name: Marcy, Geoffrey
name: McCullough, P. R.
name: Morton, Timothy D.
name: Narita, Norio
name: Paegert, Martin
name: Palle, Enric
name: Pepe, Francesco
name: Pepper, Joshua
name: Quirrenbach, Andreas
name: Rinehart, S. A.
name: Sasselov, Dimitar
name: Sato, Bun'ei
name: Seager, Sara
name: Sozzetti, Alessandro
name: Stassun, Keivan G.
name: Sullivan, Peter
name: Szentgyorgyi, Andrew
name: Torres, Guillermo
name: Udry, Stephane
name: Villasenor, Joel
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
subject: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: 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.
description: accepted for publication in the new, peer-reviewed SPIE Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems (JATIS)