Extracting Asteroseismology from TESS FFIs: The TASOC Pipeline

NASA's TESS mission is primarily designed to use the transit method to search for exoplanets around relatively bright, nearby stars over nearly the entire sky. As part of that process, the mission is expected to observe on the order of 20 million stars at 30-minute cadence in the full-frame images (FFIs) as well as a smaller but still substantial number as specific targets at 2-minute cadence. Such a data set is ideal for the study of stellar astrophysics, particularly through the use of asteroseismology. However, FFI data will be released to the public in pixel format only. Drawing on the Kepler experience, a TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium (TASC) has been formed to enable collaborative efforts to use TESS data for asteroseismology, and a TESS Asteroseismic Science Operations Center (TASOC) to produce light curves and ancillary data which are useful for that purpose. In this talk, we will briefly discuss the process and algorithms used by the TASOC, including lightcurve extraction from the FFIs, lightcurve correction for instrumental effects, automated stellar variability classification, and calibration of absolute time for the resulting photometry, as well as outlining the nature of the data products the TASOC will provide to the community. In addition, we will show results from preliminary searches for seismic detections in the TESS alert data.