Rotational Lightcurve of Asteroid 1693 Hertzsprung from TE

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Play, download and edit the video Rotational Lightcurve of Asteroid 1693 Hertzsprung from TESS.

Asteroids are ubiquitous in the sky and in astronomical imaging data - this especially applies to data from the TESS spacecraft, scanning a large fraction of the observable sky. Despite mainly searching for transiting exoplanets, TESS also observes a huge number of asteroids during its mission lifetime.

This example shows asteroid 1693 Hertzsprung during its passage of TESS Camera 1 in Sector 1. The left image cutout shows the movement of the asteroid (centered) against the sky background (moving objects are mainly stars). Background sources like stars have been subtracted from the original data, leaving some black-white structures behind in cases where the subtraction was not perfect. Red fields indicate areas that are strongly affected by these image artifacts; these fields are ignored in the measurement of the asteroid's brightness within the red circle. The right plot shows the brightness of the asteroid during its passage over nearly 25 days with a cadence of 30 min. The rotational lightcurve of the asteroid - a full rotation takes about 9 hrs - is clearly visible in the data. Outliers in the brightness measurements are due to image artifacts.

This movie has been created as part of an effort to extract information on all known asteroids from TESS data.

This result includes data collected by the TESS mission, which are publicly available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA's Science Mission directorate.

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