The TESS Input Catalog
Friday, September 7, 2018 - 08:40
in Astronomy & Space
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched on April 18, has as its core mission goal to discover small transiting exoplanets orbiting nearby bright stars, and to do so it will conduct a nearly all-sky photometric survey over the next two years. For 27.4 days at a time TESS will look at one region of the sky while its 64-million-pixel camera reads out once every 30 minutes in an effort to spot the slight dips in starlight that signal the transit of a planet across the face of a distant star. (Several hundred thousand of the pixels will read out in a two minute cadence to probe more closely high value targets.) At the end of 27.4 days TESS will point to another region of the sky and repeat.