The Kepler and TESS Asteroseismic Consortia - A Historical Overview
This overview is, in short, about people. About an idea that grew into a consortium, then a community, and finally a way of doing asteroseismology in the space era. The Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC) and later the TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium (TASC) are not just organisational structures to access data. They became collaborative ecosystems in which students, postdocs, and senior scientists learned to work together across continents, time zones, and occasionally differing opinions about filters. The idea for this booklet did not emerge from a formal meeting or a funding call. It emerged-appropriately enough for an international collaboration-over a beer. More precisely, over a beer (truth be told, more than one) at Beer Lab University in Honolulu, during the TASC7/KASC14 Workshop in 2023. Google Maps now informs us that this particular Beer Lab location is "permanently closed", which seemed at first like an ominous metaphor for fading inspiration. Fortunately, we have since learned that Beer Lab simply moved across the street, proving that good ideas, like good consortia, tend to reinvent themselves rather than disappear entirely. Somewhere between discussions that night and many others over the years, we found ourselves revisiting stories we had long heard from our former supervisors and more senior colleagues; stories of how KASC was negotiated, how the first working groups were formed, how data were filtered (a saga in its own right!), and how trust was built. This book is therefore an attempt to capture some of that collective memory, while we still have access to the primary sources. It is timed to celebrate the return of the KASC/TASC Workshop Series to Aarhus in 2026, where the consortia's original framework was set in motion. There is something fitting about reflecting on the journey of KASC and TASC as the community gathers again where it all began.