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Two of TESS's major science goals are to measure masses for 50 planetssmaller than 4 Earth radii and to discover high-quality targets for atmosphericcharacterization efforts. It is important that these two goals are linked byquantifying what precision of mass constraint is required to yield robustatmospheric properties of planets. Here, we address this by conductingretrievals on simulated JWST transmission spectra under various assumptions forthe degree of uncertainty in the planet's mass for a representative populationof seven planets ranging from terrestrials to warm Neptunes to hot Jupiters.Only for the cloud-free, low metallicity gas giants are we able to inferexoplanet mass from transmission spectroscopy alone, to ~10% accuracy. For lowmetallicity cases (<4xSolar) we are able to accurately constrain atmosphericproperties without prior knowledge of the planet's mass. For all other cases(including terrestrial-like planets), atmospheric properties can only beinferred with a mass precision of better than ~50%. At this level, though, thewidths of the posterior distributions of the atmospheric properties aredominated by the uncertainties in mass. With a precision of ~20%, the widths ofthe posterior distributions are dominated by the spectroscopic data quality.Therefore, as a rule-of-thumb, we recommend: a ~50% mass precision for initialatmospheric characterization and a ~20% mass precision for more detailedatmospheric analyses.

The Precision of Mass Measurements Required for Robust Atmospheric Characterization of Transiting Exoplanets