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Mission Overview

TSSC comet-centered data products from TESS 3I/ATLAS observations (TESS-3I)

 

Primary Investigator: Jorge Martinez-Palomera

HLSP Authors: Jorge Martinez-Palomera, Amy Tuson, and the TESS Science Support Center

Released: 2026-02-13

Updated: 2025-02-13

Primary Reference(s):  Martinez-Palomera et al. 2026

DOI: 10.17909/zefb-7f89

Citations: See ADS Statistics

Read Me

Source Data:

Slideshow

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3I/ATLAS Animation

Animation showing the background corrected images of 3I/ATLAS.

Figure 2. Animation showing the background corrected images of 3I/ATLAS.

3I/ATLAS Medium-stack image

Median-stack image of 3I/ATLAS generated from the background-corrected data.

Figure 1. Left: 3I/ATLAS median-stack image generated from the background-corrected data. Right: extracted light curves from a core small aperture (green), core large aperture (blue), and total aperture (orange). The frames where the comet passes over background stars (grey) and frames with background model edge effect caused by the comet’s tail (red).

Overview

3I/ATLAS is the third known interstellar object to pass through our Solar System. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) made dedicated observations of 3I/ATLAS between 15 – 22 January 2026 (Sector 1751), capturing high-cadence observations at 200s and 20s cadence. This collection contains two High Level Science Products (HLSPs):

(1) comet-centered image time series, corrected for background scattered light and stars; and

(2) aperture light curves extracted from the corrected images.

The team created these data products using the official TESS products and they are publicly available at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). TESS’s high-precision, near-continuous photometry will provide unique insights into the comet’s activity following its closest approach to the Sun. The TESS Science Support Center (TSSC) has created these data products to facilitate scientific analyses by the TESS and Solar System communities.

See the accompanying Jupyter notebook tutorial repository for details on how to read these files, explanation on extraction and correction process, and detailed descriptions of the table content.

Data Products

Data file naming convention:

 hlsp_tess-3i_tess_ffi_3iatlas-s1751-cam2-ccd3_tess_<version-number>_<product-type>.fits

where:

  • <version-number> is the version number of the file: the "v1.1" of the files contain the data from the first downlink (513 frames, observations through January 19, 2026). The "v2.0" files are the final version and contain all s1751 data (1835 frames, observations ending on January 22, 2026).
  • <product-type> describes the file content: target pixel ("tp") file or light curve ("lc")

Data product types:

_tp.file

Target Pixel file: a multi-extension FITS file with the background corrected image time series centered on 3I/ATLAS
_lc.fits Light Curve file: a multi-extension FITS file with the 3I/ATLAS aperture photometry light curves.

Data Access

MAST Portal and Astroquery

The TESS-3I data products are available in the MAST Search Portal (web-based, cross-mission search interface) and Astroquery (Python package to search for and download files from Python scripts you write).

  • In the MAST Search Portal, set the Provenance Name filter to "tess-3i" in an Advanced Search to find these data. The user guide for how to search and download products using the MAST Portal is available here.
  • For Astroquery, the following example code demonstrates how to search for and download these products. You can find more astroquery.mast tutorials here.
from astroquery.mast import Observations
# Search for all TESS-3I products
all_obs = Observations.query_criteria(provenance_name="tess-3i")
data_products = Observations.get_product_list(all_obs)
# Print the number of data products that would be downloaded
print(len(data_products))
# Download data
Observations.download_products(data_products)

  • MAST Portal

    Link to the MAST Portal Webpage
    A web-based interface for cross-mission searches of data at MAST or the Virtual Observatory.
    Portal

  • MAST Astroquery

    Search for and download data products for this HLSP programmatically in Python.
    MAST Astroquery

Code Examples

The authors of this HLSP have provided a GitHub repository containing Jupyter notebook tutorials for details on how to read these files, explanation of the extraction and correction process, and detailed descriptions of the table content.

Opening the TESS-3I HLSP Files

This tutorial shows how to open and read the HLSP files, adapted from this Jupyter Notebook provided by the team.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import lightkurve as lk

from astropy.io import fits

# Open File with astropy
tp_file = "hlsp_tess-3i_tess_ffi_3iatlas-s1751-cam2-ccd3_tess_v2.0_tp.fits"
hdul_tpf = fits.open(tp_file)
# Print file info
hdul_tpf.info()

# Open File with lightkurve
tpf = lk.read(tp_file, quality_bitmask="none")  # set quality_bitmask to none to see all data
tpf.target = "3I/ATLAS"  # set a more user-friendly name for plots
# Print file info
tpf

# Plot a single frame from the TP file
nt = 150
tpf.plot(frame=nt, aperture_mask="default")
plt.show()

Citations

Please remember to cite the appropriate paper(s) below and the DOI 10.17909/zefb-7f89 if you use these data in a published work. 

Note: These HLSP data products are licensed for use under CC BY 4.0.

References

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