TESS Solar System Discovery

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space-based observatory equipped with wide-field cameras designed primarily to detect exoplanets. During its observations, numerous asteroids pass through the TESS field of view. However, many of these objects are too faint to be detected in individual TESS frames because of the telescope’s limited aperture. Detecting such faint asteroids requires multi-frame search techniques that integrate a target’s signal over time. Yet, identifying these objects remains challenging due to the large search volume needed to cover the diverse orbital regimes within the solar system.

In this work, we demonstrate the ability to search for and detect solar system objects fainter than the single-frame sensitivity limit across an extensive velocity search space. Our method uses dynamic programming to efficiently evaluate trajectory hypotheses and combine a target’s signal across hundreds of frames. To date, we have achieved blind-search detections of main-belt asteroids as faint as 21.7 visual magnitude and trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) as faint as 22.4 visual magnitude, showcasing TESS’s untapped potential as a valuable platform for solar system science.

Supported by NASA / MIT MKI