Quantifying the Observational Effort Required for the Radial Velocity Characterization of TESS Planets

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical model to estimate the observational effort needed for radial velocity follow-up of TESS planets, considering stellar activity and instrument capabilities, and provides a community tool for planning observations.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism to calculate the required radial velocity measurements for TESS planets, including noise models, and offers insights into optimal strategies and instrument choices.

Findings

Optical and near-IR spectrographs perform similarly for most planets.

Characterizing small planets (<4 Earth radii) can require as little as 60 nights.

Near-IR is more efficient for Earth-sized and temperate TESS planets.

Abstract

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will conduct a 2-year long wide-field survey searching for transiting planets around bright stars. Many TESS discoveries will be amenable to mass characterization via ground-based radial velocity measurements with any of a growing suite of existing and anticipated velocimeters in the optical and near-infrared. In this study we present an analytical formalism to compute the number of radial velocity measurements---and hence the total observing time---required to characterize RV planet masses with the inclusion of either a white or correlated noise activity model. We use our model to calculate the total observing time required to measure all TESS planet masses from the expected TESS planet yield while relying on our current understanding of the targeted stars, stellar activity, and populations of unseen planets which inform the expected radial velocity precision. We also present specialized calculations applicable to a variety of interesting TESS planet subsets including the characterization of 50 planets smaller than 4 Earth radii which is expected to take as little as 60 nights of observation. Although, the efficient RV characterization of such planets requires a-priori knowledge of the `best' targets which we argue can be identified prior to the conclusion of the TESS planet search based on our calculations. Our results highlight the comparable performance of optical and near-IR spectrographs for most planet populations except for Earths and temperate TESS planets which are more efficiently characterized in the near-IR. Lastly, we present an online tool to the community to compute the total observing times required to detect any transiting planet using a user-defined spectrograph.