Antarctica Search for Transiting Extrasolar Planets

Abstract

We present “A STEP”, a project dedicated to the search for planetarytransits from Antartica. The project consists of a fully automatic 40 cm telescope equipped with an 11-million-pixel CCD installed atDome C. The site offers crucial assets for a ground-based exoplanettransit search: uninterrupted phase coverage and excellentseeing. 
This system would be able to detect hot Jupiters transiting in frontof stars as faint as magnitude sixteen and could also detect smallerplanets in close-in period around brighter stars. Our estimations,based on results of previous surveys are an average of 6 detectionsper 60 days survey. Compared to existing surveys, this excellent yieldis due to the nearly-continuous phase coverage and excellent seiing.This short term project is meant to be a photometric qualifyer for thesite and the first stage of a massive detection campaign. A mid-termobjective of 1000 detections for 2012 could be achieved either with manysmall telescopes or with a large Schmidt telescope with a large fieldof view. 
The project is relatively simple and cost-effective, and has thedouble purpose of qualifying the site and obtaining first-classscientific results. Our team is already familiar with transitdetection with an automated telescope (BEST) and cold temperaturequalification.