Director’s Discretionary Targets

The TESS Project has allocated a number of two-minute and 20-second cadence targets for programs that fall outside of the Guest Investigator program. Proposals for these Director’s Discretionary Targets (DDT) can be submitted at any time, using the process described below.  Proposal submission should generally occur at least six weeks before the beginning of the sector the targets are to be observed in. Later submission of a DDT proposal, up to two weeks before sector start, is possible under certain circumstances:  please note these circumstances in the DDT proposal.

Up to 500 DDT targets per sector will be allocated for 2-minute data targets and 200 DDT targets are allocated for 20s data.

DDT proposals do not automatically renew and must be re-proposed every year.

The list of active DDTs can be found at the bottom of this page.  The full list of DDT proposals, including target lists, can be found here (the  entries in boldface are currently active; the rest have expired).

Approval process:

• Targets reviewed by the TESS PI, a science expert selected by the TESS PI, and the TESS operations team.

• All targets will be checked to confirm that they are observable (i.e. imaged onto a CCD).  Proposers will be notified of those that will not be imaged onto a CCD. Proposers are strongly advised to check their targets before submission using the tess-point tool:  either download from https://github.com/tessgi/tess-point or use the web tool at https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/wsgi-scripts/TESS/TESS-point_Web_Tool/TESS-point_Web_Tool/wtv_v2.0.py/

• Principal requester will be notified via e-mail and approved targets will be posted here, 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

Instructions for submitting a DDT proposal:

1. Download and complete the templates below for the proposal and target list.

   • Proposals must be submitted six weeks before the start of sector (check sector calendar here).

   • Prioritize targets from 0.0 (lowest) to 1.0 (highest)

   • Keywords can include target name and any other relevant identifiers.  No limits on the number of keywords.  The DDT program number will be added to the keywords by the POC.

2. Submit template to tess-ddt at mit dot edu six weeks before start of sector. A DDT ID will be assigned to each proposal by the review team.

DDT proposal templates

• Proposal template (pdf, tex, doc)

• Target list template (csv)

Please contact the TESS Science Office with any questions at tess-ddt at mit dot edu.