Creation of Synthetic Radial Velocities to Follow Up TESS Observations
Physical and Biological Sciences
Astrophysics
Since 1995, astronomers have discovered an average of seven extra-solar planets every month and the number is increasing rapidly as technology advances. This has made it necessary to find ways to corroborate the planetary discoveries with the least possible amount of available data and within a definable budget. The proposed Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, is a joint project between MIT, Caltech, UCSC, NASA Ames Research Center, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics which just recently passed NASA’s phase-A study and it is projected to launch in late 2016. The TESS Mission will collect and record data of objects transiting in front of their parent star. Synthetic data sets and computer simulations will be used to analyze and predict the minimal time interval and ideal location for a ground-based telescope to observe and verify the data collected by a space-based telescope such as TESS. These follow-up observations will be established according to a pre-specified 10% estimation error on the planetary masses. The synthetic data utilized for this task will be generated, analyzed, and then compared to the known input values using the Systemic Console software package. The program assigns coordinates to the observed stellar targets and to the available observing locations on the ground. When the program is initialized, it registers the current time and then generates data at every 15-minute interval. Constraints, such as chances of site availability, favorable weather, full moon, and altitude are also factored by the script. Following this, the new data will be loaded into an optimization algorithm and the output will be a new, best-fit, planetary system. The final result, a module within the TESS project, will compare four variables: 1) a projected budget, 2) within this budget, the number of ground-based instruments from which we can observe, 3) the best location for observation, and 4) the minimum number of observation needed to corroborate the observational data received from TESS. It is our hope that this methodology will be employed to substantially increase the prospects of success for the TESS Mission.
