Trajectory-Agnostic Asteroid Detection in TESS with Deep Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning approach using a W-Net architecture with adaptive normalization to detect asteroids in TESS data, eliminating the need for assumptions on asteroid speed and direction.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel asteroid detection method with a new neural network architecture and adaptive normalization, applicable to TESS and future time-domain surveys.

Findings

Robust asteroid detection across various speeds and directions.

Open-source code for generating TESS training data with asteroid masks.

Method applicable to other space missions like Roman Space Telescope.

Abstract

We present a novel method for extracting moving objects from TESS data using machine learning. Our approach uses two stacked 3D U-Nets with skip connections, which we call a W-Net, to filter background and identify pixels containing moving objects in TESS image time-series data. By augmenting the training data through rotation of the image cubes, our method is robust to differences in speed and direction of asteroids, requiring no assumptions for either parameter range which are typically required in "shift-and-stack" type algorithms. We also developed a novel method for learned data scaling that we call Adaptive Normalization, which allows the neural network to learn the ideal range and scaling distribution required for optimal data processing. We built a code for creating TESS training data with asteroid masks that served as the foundation of our effort (tess-asteroid-ml), which we publicly released for the benefit of the community. Our method is not limited to TESS, but applicable for implementation in other similar time-domain surveys, making it of particular interest for use with data from upcoming missions such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and NEOSurveyor.