3:30 PM - 3:45 PM
[PAE16-07] TESS legacy: the brightest, closest transiting planets for atmospheric studies.
★Invited Papers
Keywords:exoplanets, exoplanet atmospheres, radial velocity, transit, TESS
Successfully launched in April 2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is well on its way to discovering thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky. During its initial two-year survey mission, TESS has monitored more than 200,000 targeted bright stars in the solar neighborhood for drops in brightness caused by planetary transits, discovering more than a hundred planets already and with thousands of candidates pending confirmation. The brightness of TESS host stars makes TESS planets far easier to characterize with follow-up observations than planets from prior missions. TESS follow-up observations have already enabled measurements of the masses, sizes, densities, orbits, and atmospheres of a large cohort of small planets, including habitable zone rocky worlds. In this talk, I will review the ground-based efforts to perform those observations, the facilities and teams involved, and the prospects for atmospheric studies of the most promising targets with the new generation of ground- and space-based facilities such as the GSMTs and JWST.