MEarth Project

The MEarth Project is a United States NSF-funded, robotic observatory that is part of Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, USA. The project monitors the brightness of thousands of red dwarf stars with the goal of finding transiting planets. As red dwarf stars are small, any transiting planet blocks larger portion of starlight than transits around Sun-like star. This allows smaller planets to be detected through ground-based observations. MEarth consists of eight RC Optical Systems 40 cm (16 in) f/9 Ritchey-Chrétien telescopes (on Paramount ME robotic mounts) paired with commercially available cameras with 2048 × 2048 Apogee U42 CCDs.