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Abstract |
Dome C in Antarctica provides exceptional conditions for photometry thanks to the continuous night during the Antarctic winter, a high clear sky fraction, low wind speeds, and a cold and dry atmosphere. The ASTEP project (Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) aims at detecting and characterising transiting exoplanets and qualifying this site for photometry in the visible. The main instrument, a 40 cm telescope, has been designed to perform high precision photometry under the extreme conditions of the Antarctic winter and has operated at the Concordia station since 2010. It will be upgraded with two new cameras and a new camera box in order to provide simultaneous two-colour photometry and substantially increase its throughput. The new setup will be operational for the winter campaign 2021 and will allow us to discover transiting exoplanets orbiting bright stars in particular low mass exoplanets, temperate exoplanets, exoplanets around young stars, and to refine the ephemerides of exoplanets discovered by the TESS mission. These observations will provide targets for first characterisation with the CHEOPS mission and atmospheric studies with the JWST and ARIEL missions. In this talk, I will describe the science goals and the upgrade of the ASTEP telescope. |
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