posted on 2017-02-22, 11:11authored byJ. McCormac, D. Pollacco, P. Wheatley, R. West, S. Walker, J. Bento, I. Skillen, F. Faedi, M. Burleigh, S. Casewell, B. Chazelas, L. Genolet, N. Gibson, M. Goad, K. Lawrie, R. Ryans, I. Todd, S. Udry, C. Watson
We present the prototype telescope for the Next Generation Transit Survey, which was built in the UK in 2008/09 and tested on La Palma in the Canary Islands in 2010. The goals for the prototype system were severalfold: to determine the level of systematic noise in an NGTS-like system; demonstrate that we can perform photometry at the (sub) millimagnitude level on transit timescales across a wide field; show that it is possible to detect transiting super-Earth and Neptune-sized exoplanets and prove the technical feasibility of the proposed planet survey. We tested the system for around 100 nights and met each of the goals above. Several key areas for improvement were highlighted during the prototyping phase. They have been subsequently addressed in the final NGTS facility which was recently commissioned at ESO Cerro Paranal, Chile.
Funding
This project was supported by Queen's University, Belfast, the University of Warwick and the University of Leicester. J.M. was previously supported by a Department of Employment and Learning (DEL) studentship at QUB. J.M., D.P., P.J.W., R.G.W., and S.W. are currently supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) NGTS project grant (ST/M001962/1). D.P., P.J.W., and R.G.W. are also supported by an STFC consolidated grant (ST/L000733/1).
History
Citation
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2017, 129:025002 (11pp)
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/Department of Physics and Astronomy
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Published in
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Publisher
IOP Publishing, Astronomical Society of the Pacific
10 pages, 7 figures. This work was carried out while J. McCormac, D. Pollacco, F. Faedi were at Queen's University Belfast, R. West was at the University of Leicester and J. Bento was at Warwick University