Optimizing MARVEL for the radial velocity follow-up of TESS and PLATO transiting exoplanets

TL;DR

This paper presents the optimization of the MARVEL facility's observation strategy to enhance ground-based radial velocity follow-up of exoplanets detected by TESS and PLATO, facilitating mass and orbit measurements.

Contribution

It introduces an optimized observation strategy for MARVEL, tailored to support the large-scale exoplanet follow-up from TESS and PLATO, improving efficiency and effectiveness.

Findings

MARVEL can effectively follow-up on TESS and PLATO exoplanet detections.

The strategy enhances the instrument's ability to measure exoplanet masses.

Simulation results support the feasibility of the proposed observation plan.

Abstract

The space missions TESS and PLATO plan to double the number of 4000 exoplanets already discovered and will measure the size of thousands of exoplanets around the brightest stars in the sky, allowing ground-based radial velocity spectroscopy follow-up to determine the orbit and mass of the detected planets. The new facility we are developing, MARVEL (Raskin et al. this conference), will enable the ground-based follow-up of large numbers of exoplanet detections, expected from TESS and PLATO, which cannot be carried out only by the current facilities that achieve the necessary radial velocity accuracy of 1 m/s or less. This paper presents the MARVEL observation strategy and performance analysis based on predicted PLATO transit detection yield simulations. The resulting observation scenario baseline will help in the instrument design choices and demonstrate the effectiveness of MARVEL as a TESS and PLATO science enabling facility.