The TESS Triple-9 Catalog II: a new set of 999 uniformly-vetted exoplanet candidates

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission is providing the scientific community with millions of light curves of stars spread across the whole sky. Since 2018 the telescope has detected thousands of planet candidates that need to be meticulously scrutinized before being considered amenable targets for follow-up programs. We present the second catalog of the Plant Patrol citizen science project containing 999 uniformly-vetted exoplanet candidates within the TESS ExoFOP archive. The catalog was produced by fully exploiting the power of the Citizen Science Planet Patrol project. We vetted TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs) based on the results of Discovery And Vetting of Exoplanets DAVE pipeline. We also implemented the Automatic Disposition Generator, a custom procedure aimed at generating the final classification for each TOI that was vetted by at least three vetters. The majority of the candidates in our catalog, $752$ TOIs, passed the vetting process and were labelled as planet candidates. We ruled out $142$ candidates as false positives and flagged $105$ as potential false positives. Our final dispositions and comments for all the planet candidates are provided as a publicly available supplementary table.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication on MNRA

A framework for optical features selection and management for camera-only autonomous navigation in the proximity to small celestial objects

© Cranfield University 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright owner.Small celestial bodies such as asteroids and comets are abundantly present in the Solar System, yet their surfaces remain largely unexplored. Achieving regular access to these surfaces would have a major impact on capabilities such as planetary defence and in situ resource utilisation and lead to significant scientific insights. However, missions close to small celestial objects remain challenging in at least two aspects: technically, due to weak gravity fields, complex operational environments and latency from long communication times, and commercially, with the applications still being few and cost-ineffective. A potential solution to reducing development and operational costs and obtaining robust, scalable operations, could be using small, camera-only spacecraft with an elevated degree of autonomy. Enabling a camera-based autonomy requires building appropriate computer vision pipelines. All computer vision pipelines start with the detection of features - salient patterns within the scene. This thesis presents multiple methods and tools enabling the appropriate selection and management of different features for autonomous navigation in proximity to asteroids. To that end, relevant contributions developed during this work consist of: The development of a software toolbox for prototyping and testing optical navigation technologies through a parametrisable synthetic 3D visual environment; An analysis of the response of feature detectors to internal factors (e.g., feature model) and external factors (e.g., illumination). This response, once known, can be used for designing the system or to obtain situational awareness An assessment of the response of template matching methods when the template (model) does not perfectly match the observed target (asteroid, with illumination). Through the above contributions, it was shown that considering environmental cues and the perception model helps in achieving robust camera-only navigation processes. This capability could lead to small satellites autonomously exploring hundreds or thousands of small celestial objects or be employed on more powerful spacecraft for redundancy.PH

The TESS Triple-9 Catalog: 999 uniformly vetted candidate exoplanets

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has detected thousands of exoplanet candidates since 2018, most of which have yet to be confirmed. A key step in the confirmation process of these candidates is ruling out false positives through vetting. Vetting also eases the burden on follow-up observations, provides input for demographics studies, and facilitates training machine learning algorithms. Here we present the TESS Triple-9 (TT9) catalog -- a uniformly-vetted catalog containing dispositions for 999 exoplanet candidates listed on ExoFOP-TESS, known as TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs). The TT9 was produced using the Discovery And Vetting of Exoplanets pipeline, DAVE, and utilizing the power of citizen science as part of the Planet Patrol project. More than 70% of the TOIs listed in the TT9 pass our diagnostic tests, and are thus marked as true planetary candidates. We flagged 144 candidates as false positives, and identified 146 as potential false positives. At the time of writing, the TT9 catalog contains ~20% of the entire ExoFOP-TESS TOIs list, demonstrates the synergy between automated tools and citizen science, and represents the first stage of our efforts to vet all TOIs. The DAVE generated results are publicly available on ExoFOP-TESS.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures. Accepted on MNRA