An Untargeted Survey of the Rotational Properties of Main-belt Asteroids using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

We present photometric data for minor planets observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite during its Cycle 1 operations. In total, we extracted usable detections for 37,965 objects. We present an examination of the reliability of the rotation period and light-curve amplitudes derived from each object based upon the number of detections and the normalized Lomb-Scargle power of our period fitting and compare and contrast our results with previous similar works. We show that for objects with 200 or more photometric detections and a derived normalized, generalized Lomb-Scargle power greater than 0.2, we have an 85% confidence in that period; this encompasses 3492 rotation periods we consider to be highly reliable. We independently examine a series of periods first reported by Pál et al.; periods derived in both works found to have similar results should be considered reliable. Additionally, we demonstrate the need to properly account for the true proportion of slow rotators (P > 100 hr) when inferring shape distributions from sparse photometry.