TESS-SPOC

Since the start of the TESS Mission, the TESS Science Processing Operations Center (SPOC) pipeline has been used to calibrate full-frame images (FFI) and to assign world-coordinate system information to the FFI data delivered to the MAST. The SPOC pipeline has generated target pixel files, light curves, and associated products from two-minute cadence target data, but not from FFIs (Jenkins, et al. 2016). Data provided with this release extend the SPOC pipeline processing to include targets selected from the FFIs to create target pixel and light curve files for up to 160,000 targets per sector.

Targets are selected from the FFIs using the TESS Input Catalog (TIC; Stassun et al. 2019) with a maximum of 10,000 targets per Sector on each of the sixteen TESS CCDs. Selection criteria include all two-minute cadence targets, targets bright in the near-infrared (H magnitude <=10), targets within 100 parsecs, and targets with TESS magnitude <=13.5. Details of the target selection are given in (Caldwell et al. 2020). The data products for the TESS-SPOC FFI targets are the same as for the two-minute cadence targets: calibrated target pixel files, simple aperture photometry flux time series, presearch data conditioning corrected flux time series, and cotrending basis vectors (CBV) sampled at the FFI cadence. The initial release includes TESS-SPOC FFI data products for the TESS northern hemisphere Sectors 14-26.

Data Validation Products Introduced With Sector 36 Release

Beginning May 2021, the TESS-SPOC pipeline processing was extended to run planet search on TESS-SPOC FFI targets to identify Threshold Crossing Events (TCEs). Starting with Sector 36, in addition to the light curve and target pixel files for all targets, there are TESS-SPOC FFI Data Validation (DV) products similar to those generated for two-minute cadence target data for those targets with a detected TCE. Due to longer data collection time for FFIs, the minimum transit pulse duration used in the search is 2 hours, versus 0.5 hours for two-minute cadence data. The maximum pulse duration is 15 hours for both two-minute and FFI data. TESS-SPOC FFI transit searches are only performed on a single sector at a time.

DV products are generated for TESS-SPOC FFI targets with Threshold Crossing Events (TCEs) and are summarized in the TESS Archive Manual section 2.0 Data Products Overview: Planet Search Products. For each target, there is a DV Results XML file, a DV Time Series FITS file, a human-readable full DV Report PDF, and a human-readable mini DV report PDF. For each TCE detected on the target, there is a corresponding TCE summary report PDF. The detailed content of each of these products is the same as that for two-minute cadence data and is described in the TESS Science Data Products Description Document, Sections 10-15.  Only those targets that have detected TCEs have DV products generated, thus, not all TESS-SPOC light curves will have associated DV files.

Tips On Using Portal and astroquery.mast With TESS-SPOC Data

How Do I Do A Search For Only Mission-Produced Light Curves, Only TESS-SPOC Light Curves, Or Both?

I Have One Or More Targets With Known TIC IDs, How Do I Retrieve The Light Curves For Them Efficiently?

Sector Availability

Bulk download shell scripts that use curl are provided to download every light curve (LC), target pixel (TP), or set of data validation files (DV, starting with Sector 36) for a given Sector, for those who need to download many files per Sector.  When fully downloaded, the total data volume on disk (target pixel + light curve + data validation) for a single Sector is large (~650 GB for Sectors 1-26, and ~1.8 TB for the Extended Mission Sectors, beginning with Sector 27). These data are also available in the MAST Portal and through MAST APIs like astroquery.mast.  NOTE: Currently the interactive plot tool in the Portal does not work for TESS-SPOC HLSP light curves.

Each Sector also has a tar bundle (and an associated checksum file) available for download that contains the CBV files for that Sector; the CBV bundles are not very large.  

Target List files are provided that contain the TIC ID, RA (J2000, deg), and Dec (J2000, deg) for targets that have TESS-SPOC target pixel files created.  Most, but not all, also have light curve files created for them.  For users with very large target lists, it is recommended you download these .csv files first to cross-match with your list of targets BEFORE you query MAST to search for and download TESS-SPOC data products.