Upcoming TESS Conferences

News article posted on by Knicole Colon

The first year of TESS' prime mission will be completed in July, but the science is just beginning. Two conferences are being held in July on TESS science, and it is not too late to register for them!

The first is the TASC5/KASC12 workshop, being held in Cambridge, MA from July 22-26. TASC5/KASC12 will be the first meeting where participants have the opportunity to present analysis and results from asteroseismology and precision stellar astrophysics of objects in the southern ecliptic observed by TESS. The workshop will emphasize the most recent results from TESS, but will also highlight new results from existing data from the Kepler and K2 missions; the joint meeting is the 5th workshop of the TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium and the 12th workshop of the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium. Additional details about the meeting can be found at its website.

The second is the TESS Science Conference I, being held in Cambridge, MA from July 29-August 2. The TESS Science Conference I will be the first conference dedicated to TESS mission science, including exoplanets, asteroseismology, stellar binaries, variable stars, Solar System science (e.g., asteroids and comets), extragalactic astronomy (e.g., active galactic nuclei and supernovae), and any other science that can be done with TESS data. The conference will cover all aspects of the mission, from TESS data analysis, through follow-up observations, to the impact of discoveries made with TESS data on theoretical understanding. Additional details about the meeting can be found at its website.

A third conference relevant to TESS that is happening later this year from November 4-8 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is Rocky Exoplanets in the Era of JWST: Theory and Observation. With its large primary mirror and complement of IR instrumentation, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is poised to dramatically expand our view of the environments of rocky exoplanets. JWST will be further aided by the discovery of a new crop of small planets orbiting nearby low-mass stars and brown dwarfs from the TESS mission and ground-based surveys, enabling higher precision measurements over a wider population of potentially rocky worlds. With these exciting opportunities on the horizon, now is the time to improve our understanding of what information can be gleaned about rocky worlds from these future measurements, based on our understanding of the observations themselves as well as detailed modeling of the planetary environments that will be examined. Pre-registration is now open at the meeting website.