The Cycle 8 Call for Proposals is now available on NSPIRES. The due date for proposals is March 27th 2025. TESS Cycle 8 observations will occur between September 2025 and September 2026.
The primary purpose of the TESS General Investigator (GI) Program is to enhance and maximize the science return from the mission. Users can obtain both data and funding through the TESS GI Program. The program facilitates and supports short-cadence observations with TESS as well as research undertaken with the Full-Frame Images.
Note that the TESS GI program requires that at least 25% of data used by the proposal must be new. For projects primarily using archival data, see "Can I propose to use archival data?" below.
Below you can find more information on the TESS General Investigator (GI) Program and how to propose for TESS data and research funding.
There are many great reasons to submit a TESS GI proposal. Proposors can:
- Secure high-cadence observations (20 sec and 2 min) and mission-provided lightcurves for targets of interest
- Pursue joint observing programs with Fermi, Swift, and NICER
- Obtain funds for you and your collaborators, including support for ground-based observations supporting TESS science.
- Participate in wide-range of cutting-edge science investigations with a NASA mission
Anyone is eligible to submit a TESS GI Program.
While targets can be allocated to any proposor, to recieve funding through the TESS GI Program you must be based at a US institution.
Proposals may utilize any combination of 2-minute cadence, 20-second cadence, and the Full-Frame Image data.
The proposal should provide a compelling, timely, and relevant scientific and technical justification.
The science justification may include, but is not limited to: exoplanet detection and characterization, stellar astrophysics, galactic and extragalactic astrophysics, and Solar System science.
The technical justification should be clearly described and sufficiently detailed to support the science case.
All except the mini proposals should also provide at least one paragraph for the work plan detailing how the proposed effort will be carried out.
The work plan should include the allocation of effort amongst investigators. This should be expressed in terms of each participant's role in the investigation to preserve the anonymity of the document.
Below is a summary of the available proposal categories for the TESS GI funding. Please see the proposal call for more details
| Type | Typical Duration | Budget | Targets | Page Length | Additional Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mini | One year | Not eligible | Up to fifty 20-sec cadence; up to 1000 2-min cadence | 2 | Not eligible for ground-based observations |
| Small | One year | Up to $70,000 (~1FTE for a grad student) | No limit | 4 | Ground-based proposals allowed |
| Large | One year | Up to $250,000 (~1FTE for a post doc) | No limit | 6 | Ground-based proposals allowed |
| Key Program | Max 3 years | Up to $250,000 | No limit | 6 | Ground-based proposals allowed. This category is not always solicited depending on the mission cycle (e.g. near the end of an extended mission). |
The TESS-point Web Tool is provided by the TESS Science Support Center to assist the community in planning and proposing. It allows the user to find the TESS observability of single or multiple targets, as well as calculate the brightness of a source in the TESS bandpass and estimate the corresponding TESS photometric error.
The user provides the name (or TIC ID, or RA/DEC) of an object, and the tool will output which sector and camera the object is expected to be observed. The result will be null if the target will not fall in any scheduled TESS FOV. For larger sets of targets, the TESS-point Web Tool will take an input file (csv) with RA and DEC (in decimal) and return the potential visibility (sector/camera) per object.
Proposers can follow MAST TESS tutorials to learn how to access the Target Input Catalog (TIC) and Candidate Target List (CTL), crossmatch their targets with these catalogs, and create output files with relevant target information required for the GI call. The TESS GI program office requires that if a target is in the TIC, GI proposers must provide only the following columns from the TIC in comma separated value (csv) format:
- TIC ID (if available)
- Right Ascension (decimal degrees)
- Declination (decimal degrees)
- Proper motion in Right Ascension (mas/yr)
- Proper motion in Declination (mas/yr)
- TESS mag
Since adherence to this format is critical for target list uploads to the Remote Proposal System (RPS) website , the MAST has provided a tutorial to show GI proposers how to select and output these columns for their target lists. Please follow this tutorial to provide a compliant target list.
In addition to the above six columns, the following additional columns can be provided as necessary (the columns order must not change):
- Common name of target
- Extended flag
- Special handling flag
- 20-second cadence flag
- Swift time request (ksec)
- Remarks
As many as you want!
Note that total amount of funding available is fixed. Thus if you submit multiple proposals you may be competing with yourself!
The TESS GI program uses a two-step proposal process. Phase-1 presents the scientific/technical justification. If a Phase-1 proposal is accepted and requests funding, a Phase-2 budget justification is required. All proposal materials are submitted electronically through the ARK/RPS portal .
The ARK/RPS portal has two pages: a cover page for general information and a second page for uploading the science justification and other files. The uploaded files can be updated as many times as needed before the deadline.
The TESS Science Support Center provides provides a number of freely-available tools, tutorials, guidelines, examples, and other materials to facilitate the preparation and submission process. You can find more information on specific topics in the relevant dropdowns on this page.
NSPIRES is a great resource for dual-anonymous compliance. You can consult the Guidelines for Anonymous Proposals PDF document for specific instructions. Note that this link will automatically download the PDF to your machine.
Note that the instructions provided in the "Guidelines for Anonymous Proposals" supersede the default instructions given in the NASA
The "Guidelines for Anonymous Proposals" document also contains complete information on how to write the required "Expertise and Resources - Not Anonymized" document.
When writing the anonymous part of your Phase-1 proposal, make sure to eliminate language that identifies you or your institution. For example, instead of using "...as we demonstrated in Smith et al. (2022)..." you can instead use "...as demonstrated by [1]...", and then put [1] into the reference list. Another example of compliance issue could be "...we have guaranteed time on our 1.5-m campus telescope at the University of Maryland...". Instead, you can say "...we have guaranteed time on a 1.5-m telescope..." and then describe the facility in the "Expertise and Resources - Not Anonymized" part of the Phase-1 proposal.
Speaking of references, they should always be in a [1], [2], [3] format in the main body of the proposal.
NASA understands that dual-anonymous peer review represents a major shift in the evaluation of proposals, and as such there may be occasional slips in writing anonymized proposals.
However, NASA reserves the right to return without review proposals that are particularly egregious in terms of the identification of the proposing team.
Proposals are solicited once a year, typically in the spring. You can find more details on NSPIRES
NASA recognizes and supports the benefits of having diverse and inclusive scientific, engineering, and technology communities and fully expects that such values will be reflected in the composition of the peer review panels and the proposal teams.
All proposals are peer-reviewed and ranked by a panel of professional volunteers through a double-blind process, followed by ratification from NASA Headquarters.
The members of the peer-review panel will not be disclosed.
The deliberations of the panel will be disclosed to PIs only after ratification by the selecting official.
The review panels will evaluate the anonymized proposals based on their scientific merit, without initially taking into account the proposing team qualifications.
Only after the scientific evaluation is finalized for all proposals, the panel will review the "Expertise and Resources - Not Anonymized" documents.
The panel will validate the qualifications of the team in order to allow the reviewers to assess the team capabilities required to execute a given proposed science investigation.
The TESS GI program supports a wide variety of scientific proposals covering multiple aspects of astrophysics. All proposal are evaluated equally.
The titles and abstracts of all accepted GI proposals can be found here and additional links therein.
Yes! You can check out out tutorials and additional links therein.
You can make a no cost extension request by filling out this form .
Proposals to use archival TESS data or to perform other TESS-related investigations could be submitted through the following solicitations:
Yes! TESS has a Director's Discretionary Target (DDT) program.
The DDT and out-of-cycle Target of Opportunity processes for TESS draws on those used successfully for the NuStar Explorer mission. Proposals for DDT and the corresponding targets will be submitted through a form on the MIT TESS website . The requests will be reviewed by the TESS PI, a science expert selected by the TESS PI, and the TESS operations team. Approved targets will be posted on the MIT TESS website, along with the expected time(s) of observation. There is no proprietary period for approved DDT observations. Data from a DDT observation will be delivered to the TESS archives concurrently with the non-DDT data from the sector in which the DDT is observed. Note that a number of targets per sector have been reserved for targets which are not covered in the GI target lists, yet may warrant inclusion as targets.
Are any of your questions not answered? You can always reach out to TESS GI Helpdesk at tesshelp@bigbang.gsfc.nasa.gov. We are happy to help answer any TESS-related questions!