TESS Solar System Discovery

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an all-sky survey mission with the goal of discovering exoplanets around bright and nearby stars. The TESS instrument, consisting of four wide-field cameras, observes a sky region for 27 days at a time before moving on to the next ¹. During these observation sectors, many solar system objects passed through the instrument’s field of view. Asteroids have been detected in TESS data up to visual magnitude of 19 - 19.5 with 30-mintute cadence data ^{2 3}. Asteroids fainter than this single-frame limit will require multi-frame search techniques such as track-before-detect or synthetic tracking. Challenges remain in the discovery of faint objects due to the large search volume needed to cover relevant orbital regimes of solar system objects.

In this work, we demonstrate the ability to search for solar system objects fainter than the single-frame limit over a large velocity search space to discover new inner and outer solar system objects. Our approach is to employ dynamic programming to quickly evaluate track hypotheses and integrate the target’s signal over hundreds of frames. Our progress so far includes blind-search detections of main-belt asteroids up to 21.5 visual magnitudes and trans-Neptunian objects up to 22.4 visual magnitudes.