TESS Data Release Notes: Sectors 1 – 36, Multi-sector Search, DR53

These Data Release Notes provide information on the processing and export of data
from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). This data release is a combined,
multi-sector transit search only. The underlying data products from individual observing
sectors have been previously released. The data products included in this data release
are the Data Validation (DV) reports, time series, and associated xml files for the threshold
crossing events (TCEs) found by searching a combined data set including data from multiple
observing sectors.

These data products were generated by the TESS Science Processing Operations Center
(SPOC, Jenkins et al., 2016) at NASA Ames Research Center from data collected by the
TESS instrument, which is managed by the TESS Payload Operations Center (POC) at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The format and content of these data products
are documented in the Science Data Products Description Document (SDPDD)1. The
SPOC science algorithms are based heavily on those of the Kepler Mission science pipeline,
and are described in the Kepler Data Processing Handbook (Jenkins, 2020)2. The Data
Validation algorithms are documented in Twicken et al. (2018) and Li et al. (2019). The
TESS Instrument Handbook (Vanderspek et al., 2018) contains more information about the
TESS instrument design, detector layout, data properties, and mission operations.
The TESS Mission is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate.