One of These Things is Not Like the Other

The first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet was made in 1988, and since then, the field has become pretty popular.  Space agencies from around the world have worked to commission telescopes like Kepler and CoRoT whose primary objective is to discover new exoplanets.

Kepler

CoRoT

So what makes PHATSY different?

Well, first, I should tell you that PHATSY is the Planet Harvester Automated Transit Survey in Y.  This means we plan to use automated units, most likely in the Y band (about 1020 nm), to discover new planets.  Our goal is to make the units so self-sufficient that the people who agree to host them for us don't have to do anything but turn them on.  There are three main differences between our project and those that have already been put into use.  

1. Cost: our project will cost SO MUCH LESS money than the telescopes put up by professional organizations
2. Equipment: we'll be using amateur astronomer and commercial equipment
3. Distribution of Units: our units will be distributed around the entire world as opposed to being clustered in one location

Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most well-known telescopes in orbit (though I may be basing that statement off of a biased sample), cost $1.5 billion to construct and launch.  That doesn't include annual costs to staff its personnel facilities or maintain it.  Our units will only cost about $2500 a piece and will require little to no upkeep cost.  Why are we able to keep the cost so low?  That takes us to difference #2.  

Organizations like NASA use super high-quality equipment.  They kind of have to if they want to 1) send something into space and 2) ensure that it will survive once it gets there. The equipment they use is so fancy that, for the most part, only specially-trained people are allowed to work on it--engineers.  We don't have to deal with that!  Technology has advanced so much that a really nice camera--like digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras and even some camera phones (!)--has high enough resolution to take decent pictures of the sky.  

This is one of the pictures we took last week. Do you see how many stars there are?!?! And we're in Boston! Bright, light polluted Boston!  

Our units will all be made up of one DSLR camera, one protective case, and a raspberry pi pre-loaded with the code that will tell the camera to take our images every night.  The best part about this is that these are amateur and commercial tools! Anyone can use them, which is good because we're not sending these units to professional telescope engineers.

And that takes us to difference #3.  The exoplanet-finding devices I listed above are both space telescopes.  There are a few ground-based telescopes and interferometers that are used to find exoplanets, but they all have something in common: they don't move.  And that's not bad! It just means that they can only observe at night. 

We plan on distributing our units latitudinally around the whole world, essentially turning PHATSY into the newest world-wide empire, but this time it would never see the light of day.  

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of why this project is important and what it can bring to the scientific community. See you next week!