Teo Močnik: Weighing TESS Planets with Keck

Weighing TESS Planets with Keck

Teo Močnik

University of California in Riverside, California, USA

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space-based telescope,
which is designed to detect transiting planets around bright, nearby stars. TESS
is expected to find around 250 planets smaller than 2 Earth radii among a total
of 1250 planets of any size from the nominal 2-year mission 2018 – 2020. Most of
these planets will orbit stars that are bright enough to measure their masses with
ground-based telescopes via the Doppler spectroscopy radial velocity method.
The TESS-Keck Survey (TKS) is the largest collaborative effort in the northern
hemisphere to measure precise masses and orbits of over 100 TESS-discovered
planets, nearly doubling the existing population of planets smaller than 5 Earth
radii with measured masses. This will unlock several important investigations,
grouped into three main science themes: planet bulk compositions, orbital archi-
tectures, and planetary atmospheres. To achieve these goals, TKS was allocated
a total of 168 observing nights between 2019 and 2021 to use the HIRES spec-
trograph at the 10 m Keck telescope. In this talk, I will present an overview and
the current status of the TESS mission and the TKS survey.