SuperWASP

Wide Angle Search for Planets

SuperWASP-South cameras on OMI equatorial mount
Abbreviation	WASP
Purpose	Search for distant planets
Region served	La Palma and Sutherland
Membership	Eight universities
Website	wasp-planets.net www.superwasp.org

WASP or Wide Angle Search for Planets is an international consortium of several academic organisation performing an ultra-wide angle search for exoplanets using transit photometry. The array of robotic telescopes aims to survey the entire sky, simultaneously monitoring many thousands of stars at an apparent visual magnitude from about 7 to 13.

SuperWASP is the detection program composed of the Isaac Newton Group, IAC and six universities from the United Kingdom. The two continuously operating, robotic observatories cover the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, respectively. SuperWASP-North is located at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canary Island, Spain, while SuperWASP-South is located at the site of the South African Astronomical Observatory, near Sutherland, South Africa. Both observatories use eight wide-angle cameras that simultaneously monitor the sky for planetary transit events and allow the monitoring of millions of stars simultaneously, enabling the detection of rare transit events.

Instruments used for follow-up characterization employing doppler spectroscopy to determine the exoplanet's mass include the HARPS spectrograph of ESO's 3.6-metre telescope as well as the Swiss Euler Telescope, both located at La Silla Observatory, Chile. WASP's design has also been adopted by the Next-Generation Transit Survey. As of 2016, the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia data base contains a total of 2,107 extrasolar planets of which 118 were discoveries by WASP.