Smith Jeffrey

Abstract Reference: 30336
Identifier: P1.29
Presentation: Poster presentation
Key Theme: 1 Reduction and Analysis Algorithms for Large Databases and Vice-versa

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: The Success of the Kepler Transit Finding Pipeline and its Adaptation to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

Authors:
Smith Jeffrey C., Jenkins Jon M. Twicken Joseph D., McCauliff Sean, Tenenbaum Peter, Campbell Jennifer, Dwight Sanderfer, Caldwell Douglass A., Girouard Forrest, Morris Robert M., Mansouri-Samani Masoud, Latham David

Building upon the great success of the Kepler mission, the team at NASA Ames Research Center is adapting the Kepler Science Processing Pipeline for use with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which will conduct a search for Earth’s closest cousins starting in late 2017. Tess will conduct an all-sky transit survey of F, G and K dwarf stars between 4 and 12 magnitudes and most known M dwarf stars within 200 light years. TESS will discover ~1,000 small planets and measure the masses of at least 50 planets of less than 4 Earth radii. For each 27.4-day period, TESS will observe a 24° by 96° swath of sky extending from near the ecliptic equator to the ecliptic pole. The TESS Science Processing Operations Center (SPOC) is being developed based on the Kepler Science Operations Center. The pipeline will run on the NAS Pleiades supercomputer and provide calibrated pixels, simple and systematic error-corrected aperture photometry, and centroid locations for all 200,000+ target stars, observed over the 2-year mission, along with associated uncertainties. The SPOC will search for periodic transit events and generate validation products for the transit-like features in the light curves. All TESS SPOC data products are modeled on the Kepler archive products and will be archived to the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). The TESS pipeline will search through all light curves for evidence of periodic transit signals that occur when a planet crosses the disk of its host star. It will generate a suite of diagnostic metrics for each transit-like signature discovered, and extract planetary parameters by fitting a limb-darkened transit model to each potential planetary signature. The results of the transit search will be similar in content to the highly successful Kepler transit search products (tabulated numerical results, time series products, and pdf reports) all of which will be archived to MAST. This presentation provides an overview of the TESS science pipeline and describes the development remaining for the SPOC prior to launch in December 2017.  We will discuss the peculiarities of the TESS data, how they diverge from the Kepler data and challenges in automatic processing of such a large data set. The data rate for TESS is about 10 times greater than that of Kepler and we will discuss improvements and optimizations to the algorithms to allow the mission to keep up with the planned 27 day data processing cycle for each sky sector.