The TESS Mission Target Selection Procedure

Kavli Affiliate: Christopher J. Burke

| First 5 Authors: Michael Fausnaugh, Ed Morgan, Roland Vanderspek, Joshua Pepper, Christopher J. Burke

| Summary:

We describe the target selection procedure by which stars are selected for
2-minute and 20-second observations by TESS. We first list the technical
requirements of the TESS instrument and ground systems processing that limit
the total number of target slots. We then describe algorithms used by the TESS
Payload Operation Center (POC) to merge candidate targets requested by the
various TESS mission elements (the Target Selection Working Group, TESS
Asteroseismic Science Consortium, and Guest Investigator office). Lastly, we
summarize the properties of the observed TESS targets over the two-year primary
TESS mission. We find that the POC target selection algorithm results in 2.1 to
3.4 times as many observed targets as target slots allocated for each mission
element. We also find that the sky distribution of observed targets is
different from the sky distributions of candidate targets due to technical
constraints that require a relatively even distribution of targets across the
TESS fields of view. We caution researchers exploring statistical analyses of
TESS planet-host stars that the population of observed targets cannot be
characterized by any simple set of criteria applied to the properties of the
input Candidate Target Lists.

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