Flux calibration in TESS

TESS will take (and save) Full Frame Images at 30 minute cadence for their entire mission. However, like Kepler (and K2), the TESS pipeline will provide a differential photometry data product. i.e. the data is not flux calibrated.

The Guest-Investigator (GI) program for TESS does provide a level of funding for software projects if they are doing something value-added and unique for the community. Flux calibration should be very doable, given the FFI’s.

The question I see (and without enough knowledge of the TESS detector and hardware) is this: What are the calibration frames that are required to do this?. Put another way, what could Kepler have done to accomplish this?

Some relevant literature:

• Bryson et al. (2010)
• Hogg et al. (2013)
  • and associated GitHub repository
• Stubbs et al. (2016)