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Next-Generation Transit Survey

Next-Generation Transit Survey
NGST facility with the VLT (left) and VISTA (right) in the background
Engineering rendering the facility NGTS observations at night
The array of twelve 0.2-metre robotic telescopes

The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a ground-based robotic search for exoplanets. The facility is located at Paranal Observatory on the outskirts of the Atacama desert in northern Chile, a few kilometers from ESO's Very Large Telescope and near the VISTA Survey Telescope. Science operations began in early 2015. The astronomical survey is managed by a consortium of seven European universities and other academic institutions from Chile, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Prototypes of the array were tested in 2009 and 2010 on La Palma, and from 2012 to 2014 at Geneva Observatory.

The aim of NGTS is to discover super-Earths and exo-Neptunes transiting relatively bright and nearby stars with an apparent magnitude of up to 13. The survey uses transit photometry, which precisely measures the dimming of a star to detect the presence of a planet when it crosses in front of it. NGTS consists of an array of twelve commercial 0.2-metre telescopes (f/2.8), each equipped with a red-sensitive CCD camera operating in the visible and near-infrared at 600–900 nm. The array covers an instantaneous field of view of 96 square degrees (8 deg2 per telescope) or around 0.23% of the entire sky. NGTS builds heavily on the experience of its predecessor, SuperWASP, using more sensitive detectors, refined software, and improved optics. Compared to the Kepler spacecraft with its fixed field of view of 115 square degrees, the sky area covered by NGTS will be sixteen times larger, because the survey intends to scan four different fields every year over a period of four years. As a result, the number of discovered nearby exoplanets will be much larger.


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