Empirical Predictions for the Period Distribution of Planets to Be Discovered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

Launched in 2018 April, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has been performing a wide-field survey for exoplanets orbiting bright stars with a goal of producing a rich database for follow-on studies. Here we present estimates of the detected exoplanet orbital periods in the 2 minute cadence mode during the TESS mission. For a two-transit detection criterion, the expected mean value of the most frequently detected orbital period is 5.01 days, with the most frequently detected range of 2.12-11.82 days in the region with observation of 27 days. Near the poles where the observational duration is 351 days, the expected mean orbital period is 10.93 days, with the most frequently detected range being from 3.35 to 35.65 days. For one transit, the most frequently detected orbital period is 8.17 days in the region with observation of 27 days and 11.25 days in the region near the poles. For the entire TESS mission containing several sectors, we estimate that the mean value of orbital period is 8.47 days for two-transit detection criterion and 10.09 days for one-transit detection criterion. If TESS yields a planet population substantially different from what is predicted here, the underlying planet occurrence rates are likely different between the stellar sample probed by TESS and that by Kepler.