PASS: An All Sky Survey for the Detection of Transiting Extrasolar Planets and for Permanent Variable Star Tracking

An overview is given of the Permanent All Sky Survey (PASS) project. Theprimary goal of PASS is the detection of all transiting giant planets in theentire sky, complete for stellar systems of magnitudes ~ 5.5-10.5. Since thesample stars are fairly bright and relatively close, planets detected by PASSwould be ideally suited for any follow-up study with ground- or space-basedinstrumentation. The survey would also allow the pursuit of a variety of workon temporal astronomical phenomena of any kind, and is intended to lead to apermanent all-sky tracking of variable stars with high temporal resolution. Theinstrument consists of arrays of CCD cameras with wide-field optics that coverthe entire sky visible from their observing locations. Calculations of theinstrument's noise sources and subsequent simulations indicate that theproposed design is able to achieve the prime objective of a full-sky survey fortransits. An equation for the signal-to-noise ratio from photometry of unguidedstellar images is given in the appendix, together with equations for thedetection probability of planetary transits based on the observational coverageand the instrument's duty cycle.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, accepted by PAS