Deep Field · the discovery room
Navigate the sky.
Find what's hiding.
Fly through the real TESS frontier — every star the mission flagged, in 3D — then drop into the same pipeline professionals run: TESS photometry from NASA's MAST archive, a Box Least Squares transit search, the phase fold, and the vetting checks that kill false positives. Train a model on the confirmed planets to rank the rest. Everything here is a quick-look: candidate, never confirmed.
Loading the TESS sky…
Target
Pick a star. MAST has the receipts.
Photometry
The flattened light curve, exactly as NASA's pipeline delivered it.
Waiting on the previous station.
Periodogram
Box Least Squares: try every period, keep the one the data votes for.
Waiting on the previous station.
Phase fold
Stack every orbit on top of itself. A planet becomes a dip; noise stays noise.
Waiting on the previous station.
Vetting
Most transit-shaped signals are not planets. Prove yours isn't one of those.
Waiting on the previous station.
Publish to the Loop
A candidate nobody can replay is a rumor. The brief carries the ephemeris; the permalink replays the pipeline.
Waiting on the previous station.
Flight rules · from this screen to the NASA Exoplanet Archive
DEEP FIELD gets you to a defensible candidate. Here is the real, unglamorous path the pros and the citizen scientists both walk — every step of it open to you.
1 · Cross-match before you celebrate
Look your star up on ExoFOP-TESS by TIC id. Most strong signals at bright stars are already a TOI or a confirmed planet — π Men c has been TOI-144 since 2018. A duplicate submission gets removed, and repeat offenders get suspended.
2 · Vet beyond the quick-look
This room's checks are first-order. Real vetting adds what we can't do here: pixel-level centroid shifts (is the dip even on your star? TESS pixels are 21″ wide), nearby eclipsing binaries, and the SPOC Data Validation reports on MAST.
3 · Submit a Community TOI (cTOI) on ExoFOP
Free registered account. Creating a candidate needs ≥2 of {period, epoch (BJD), depth (ppm)}; consideration by the TOI working group needs all four — period, epoch, depth, and duration, with realistic uncertainties — plus an uploaded light-curve image showing the fitted transit. And no, you don't get to call it "b": letters are assigned only after peer-reviewed confirmation.
4 · The TOI team reviews it
The MIT-led TESS Objects of Interest working group reviews cTOIs; candidates that meet the standard get a TOI number. This pipeline works for amateurs: Planet Hunters TESS volunteers (7M+ classifications and counting) have had dozens of their cTOIs promoted.
5 · TFOP hunts the false positives
The TESS Follow-up Observing Program swings ground telescopes at surviving TOIs: seeing-limited photometry (SG1), reconnaissance spectroscopy (SG2), high-resolution imaging (SG3), then precision radial velocities (SG4) for a mass. Most candidates die here — that's the system working.
6 · Peer review, then the Archive
There is no inbox at NASA for planets. A candidate becomes a planet in a refereed journal — statistical validation or RV confirmation — and the NASA Exoplanet Archive ingests it from the literature. That's the moment the count ticks up.