Tess offers an unprecedented combination of precision photometry with exceptional sky and temporal coverage. Full-frame tess images enable complete, magnitude-limited censuses of eclipsing binaries,…

This is a $3,289.50 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to develop an approach to improve the scientific utility of full-frame light curves from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The project aims to leverage data from the Gaia satellite to enable a highly-constrained fit to TESS photometry, producing science-ready light curves for every star brighter than 16th magnitude in the TESS full-frame images. This work is expected to enable a dramatic expansion in the use of TESS full-frame data, revolutionizing research on eclipsing binaries, transiting exoplanets, and stellar variability. The grant does not have a set-aside designation, indicating the award was competitively secured based on UCSB's technical capabilities. As a prominent public research university, UCSB has a strong track record of delivering specialized scientific research and innovative solutions to federal agencies through both contract and grant awards.

Tess offers an unprecedented combination of precision photometry with exceptional sky and temporal coverage. Full-frame tess images enable complete, magnitude-limited censuses of eclipsing binaries, exoplanets, and transients. However, the large size of tess pixels and the complexity of backgrounds in tess images have proved challenging to overcome. Full-frame light curves typically require extensive modeling and post-processing to be science-ready. In this proposal, we describe an approach to overcome the limitations of tess full-frame light curves by leveraging the gaia satellite. Gaia provides precise positions for all STARS visible in tess, along with colors and magnitudes in two bands, gaia g and gaia RP, similar to the tess band. This enables a highly-constrained fit to tess photometry, where the positions of all STARS are known almost exactly and their brightnesses are similarly known with high precision. We propose to build and publicly release a light curve for every star brighter than 16TH magnitude in the tess full-frame images. These light curves will produce useful science with minimal postprocessing, enabling a dramatic expansion in the use of tess full frame data. These light curves will enable a revolution in eclipsing binary work, will extend the full-sky census of transiting exoplanets to fainter magnitudes, and enable studies of stellar variability across the sky.