The SPECULOOS telescopes and searching for red worlds in the northern skies
Published Date: 6/21/2019
Source: phys.org
With a new telescope situated on a scenic plateau in Tenerife, Spain, MIT planetary scientists now have an added way to search for Earth-sized exoplanets. Artemis, the first ground-based telescope of the SPECULOOS Northern Observatory (SNO), joins a network of 1-meter-class robotic telescopes as part of the SPECULOOS project (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars), which is led by Michael Gillon at the University of Liège in Belgium and carried out in collaboration with MIT and several other institutions and financial supporters. Artemis is the latest product of a collaboration with MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). The other network telescopes that make up the SPECULOOS Southern Observatory—named Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto after the four Galilean moons of Jupiter—are up and running at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, busily scanning the skies for exoplanets in the Southern Hemisphere.