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Solar System Objects Observed with TESS--First Data Release: Bright Main-Belt and Trojan Asteroids from the Southern Survey

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Solar System Objects Observed with TESS--First Data Release: Bright Main-Belt and Trojan Asteroids from the Southern Survey Draft version January 17, 2020 Preprint typeset using LATEX style AASTeX6 v. 1.0 SOLAR SYSTEM OBJECTS OBSERVED WITH TESS – FIRST DATA RELEASE: BRIGHT MAIN-BELT AND TROJAN ASTEROIDS FROM THE SOUTHERN SURVEY Andras´ Pal´ 1,2,3, Robert´ Szakats´ 1, Csaba Kiss1, Attila Bodi´ 1,4, Zsofia´ Bognar´ 1,4, Csilla Kalup2,1, Laszl´ o´ L. Kiss1, Gabor´ Marton1, Laszl´ o´ Molnar´ 1,4, Emese Plachy1,4, Krisztian´ Sarneczky´ 1, Gyula M. Szabo´5,6, and Robert´ Szabo´1,4 1Konkoly Observatory, Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, H-1121 Budapest, Konkoly Thege Mikl´os ´ut 15-17, Hungary 2E¨otv¨os Lor´and University, H-1117 P´azm´any P´eter s´et´any 1/A, Budapest, Hungary 3MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, 70 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02109, USA 4MTA CSFK Lend¨ulet Near-Field Cosmology Research Group 5ELTE E¨otv¨os Lor´and University, Gothard Astrophysical Observatory, Szombathely, Hungary 6MTA-ELTE Exoplanet Research Group, 9700 Szombathely, Szent Imre h. u. 112, Hungary ABSTRACT Compared with previous space-borne surveys, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) pro- vides a unique and new approach to observe Solar System objects. While its primary mission avoids the vicinity of the ecliptic plane by approximately six degrees, the scale height of the Solar System debris disk is large enough to place various small body populations in the field-of-view. In this paper we present the first data release of photometric analysis of TESS observations of small Solar System Bodies, focusing on the bright end of the observed main-belt asteroid and Jovian Trojan popula- tions. This data release, named TSSYS-DR1, contains 9912 light curves obtained and extracted in a homogeneous manner, and triples the number of bodies with unambiguous fundamental rotation characteristics, namely where accurate periods and amplitudes are both reported. Our catalogue clearly shows that the number of bodies with long rotation periods are definitely underestimated by all previous ground-based surveys, by at least an order of magnitude. Keywords: Method: observational – Techniques: photometric – Minor planets, asteroids: general – Astronomical databases: catalogues – Astronomical databases: surveys 1. INTRODUCTION equivalent to a nearly contiguous rectangle in the sky, ◦ ◦ The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite with a size of 96 × 24 . The individual camera FoVs are (Ricker et al. 2015, TESS) has successfully been also identified by the camera numbers and, according launched on April 18, 2018 and after commissioning, to the survey design, Camera #4 continuously starred started its routine operations on July 25, 2018. Dur- at the southern ecliptic pole while Camera #1 scanned ing the first two years of its primary mission, TESS the subsequent fields just south from the ecliptic plane. observations are scheduled in terms of “TESS sectors” The cadence of TESS observations is 30 minutes in the arXiv:2001.05822v1 [astro-ph.EP] 16 Jan 2020 (or simply, sectors) where each sector corresponds to so-called full-frame image (FFI) mode while pre-selected roughly 27 days of nearly continuous observations (in sources are observed with a cadence of 2 minutes (hence, accordance with two orbits of TESS around Earth, this mode is also called “postage stamp” mode). These with a spacecraft orbit in 1:2 mean-motion resonance two modes are also referred to as long cadence and with the Moon). The first year of observations ended short cadence observations: for TESS, long cadence also on July 18, 2019, after completing the 13th sector implies that the whole CCD frame is retrieved. (S13). Throughout these 13 sectors, TESS observed This mission design allows us to observe Solar System the primary fields on the Southern Ecliptic Hemisphere, objects during the primary mission, even considering the covering the sky from the ecliptic latitude of β ≈ -6◦, fact that the ecliptic plane is avoided by ∼ 6 degrees. down to the southern ecliptic pole1. This coverage is At first glance, objects with an inclination higher than attained by four wide-field cameras, each camera having ∼ 6 degrees are expected to be observed, but due to the a field-of-view (FoV) of 24◦ × 24◦ and the gross FoV is ∼1 AU distance of TESS to the Sun and the semi-major axis range of 2.1 − 3.3 AU for the main-belt asteroids, apal@szofi.net also considering their non-zero eccentricities, thousands 1 https://tess.mit.edu/observations/ 2 of objects with a few degrees of inclination are also pos- and what kind of object selection principles are available sible to be observed with the aforementioned spacecraft for a mission like TESS. In Sec. 3 we discuss the main attitude configuration. This limit of 6◦ . i is more strict steps of the data reduction and photometry, emphasizing for distant objects, such as Centaurs or trans-Neptunian the importance of differential image analysis. Sec. 4 sum- objects. marizes the structure of the available data products while According to earlier simulations (P´al, Moln´ar & Kiss in Sec. 5 we make a series of comparisons with existing 2018), one can expect good quality photometry of mov- databases aiming to collect photometric data series for ing targets down to V . 19 mag with a time resolution small Solar System bodies. Our findings are summarized of 30 minutes corresponding to the data acquisition cy- in Sec. 6. cle of the TESS cameras in full-frame mode. Although the cadence for the postage stamp mode frames would 2. OBJECT SELECTION allow a similar precision down to the brighter objects Regarding to the identification and querying Solar Sys- (i.e. V . 16 mag), the corresponding pixel allocation tem objects on TESS FFIs, one can ask two types of would be too expensive. In this aspect, TESS short questions: cadence observations are analogous the Kepler/K2 mis- sion (Borucki et al. 2010; Howell et al. 2014) and simi- • When and by which Camera/CCD was my target larly, only pre-selected objects could be observed in this of interest observed? mode (Szab´oet al. 2015; P´al et al. 2015). Specifically, • Which objects were observed by a certain Cam- one should allocate roughly a thousand pixel-wise stamp era/CCD during a given sector? if observations for a certain object are required. The rule-of-thumb for the apparent tracks of main-belt aster- We can also connect these questions to the K2 Solar Sys- oids on long cadence TESS images is the movement of tem observations. Namely, the first question is related ≈ 1 pixel/cadence (see also Fig. 2 in P´al, Moln´ar & Kiss to the computation of the pixel coverage of an asteroid 2018). Of course, NEOs and trans-Neptunian objects track, as it was done in the case of K2 mission while could have apparent speeds which are larger and smaller, observing pre-selected objects (see e.g. P´al et al. 2015; respectively. Kiss et al. 2016; P´al et al. 2016) and the second question The yield of such a survey performed by TESS is a se- is related to the observations of serendipitous asteroids ries of (nearly) uninterrupted, long-coverage light curves crossing large, contiguous K2 superstamps (Szab´oet al. of Solar System objects – like in the case of previous 2016; Moln´ar et al. 2018). space-borne studies mentioned below. From these light In order to identify the objects which were observed curves, one can obtain fundamental physical character- by a certain Camera/CCD during a given sector, we istics of the bodies such as rotation periods, shape con- followed a similar approach as it was done in our K2 straints and signs of rotating on a non-principal axis - asteroid studies (Moln´ar et al. 2018; Szab´oet al. 2016) with a much lesser ambiguity than in the case of ground- and in the case of simulations of TESS observations based surveys. This ambiguity is mainly due to the fact (P´al, Moln´ar & Kiss 2018). Our solutions are based on that ground-based photometric data acquisition is in- an off-line tool called EPHEMD, providing a server-side terrupted by diurnal variations – which yield not just backend for massive queries optimized for defining longer stronger frequency aliasing but higher fraction of long- time intervals and larger field-of-views within the same term instrumental systematics. In addition, the knowl- call (see P´al, Moln´ar & Kiss 2018, for more details). In edge of rotation period helps to resolve the ambigu- fact, the catalogue presented in this paper is retrieved by ity of rotation and thermal inertia (see e.g. Delbo et al. simply executing EPHEMD queries on per-CCD basis for 2015) in thermal emission measurements of small bod- each sectors. Due to the dramatic decrease of the aster- ies. Further combination of spin information with ther- oid density at higher ecliptic latitudes, in this catalogue mal data (see e.g. M¨uller et al. 2009; Szak´ats et al. 2017; (DR1) we included only the observations from Camera Kiss et al. 2019)2 can therefore be an important initia- #1. tive. This paper describes the first data release, TSSYS- 3. DATA REDUCTION AND PHOTOMETRY DR1 of the TESS minor planet observations, based on As it was mentioned above, the whole data process- the publicly available TESS FFI data for the first full ing of this catalogue was based on the observations per- year of operations on the Southern Hemisphere. The formed by Camera #1 while surveying TESS sectors structure of this paper goes as follows. In the next sec- ranging from 1 up to 13. The processing has been car- tion, Sec. 2 we describe how the objects were identified ried out on a per-CCD basis, executing the same set of routines on the 13 × 4 = 52 blocks of images correspond- 2 https://ird.konkoly.hu/data/SBNAF_IRDB_public_release_note_2019March29.pdfing to a single-sector-single-CCD acquisition run.
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