A TESS Search for Distant Solar System Objects: Yield Estimates

Abstract

As the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) fulfills its primary mission, it is executing an unprecedented survey of almost the entire sky: TESS's approved extended mission will likely extend sky coverage to ~94%, including ~60% of the ecliptic. In an accompanying note we demonstrated that `digital tracking' techniques can be used to efficiently `shift-and-stack' TESS full frame images (FFIs) and showed that combining ~1,300 exposures from a TESS sector gives a 50% detection threshold of $I_C\sim 22.0\pm0.5$, raising the possibility that TESS could discover the hypothesized Planet Nine. In this note, we estimate the yield for such a survey and demonstrate that this technique has the potential to discover hundreds of Kuiper Belt Objects, Scattered Disk Objects and Centaurs in TESS FFI data.