THE TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE: SIMULATIONS OF PLANET DETECTIONS AND ASTROPHYSICAL FALSE POSITIVES

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA-sponsored Explorer mission that will perform a wide-field survey for planets that transit bright host stars. Here, we predict the properties of the transiting planets that TESS will detect along with the eclipsing binary stars that produce false-positive photometric signals. The predictions are based on Monte Carlo simulations of the nearby population of stars, occurrence rates of planets derived from Kepler, and models for the photometric performance and sky coverage of the TESS cameras. We expect that TESS will find approximately 1700 transiting planets from 2×105 pre-selected target stars. This includes 556 planets smaller than twice the size of…