Engaging Citizen Scientists to Keep Transit Times Fresh and Ensure the Efficient Use of Transiting Exoplanet Characterization Missions
Robert T. Zellem, Anya Biferno, David R. Ciardi, Mary Dussault, Laura Peticolas, Martin Fowler, Kyle A. Pearson, Wilfred Gee, Rachel Zimmerman-Brachman, Denise Smith, Lynn Cominsky, Gael M. Roudier, Brandon Lawton, Robert Baer, Diana Dragomir, Nemanja Jovanovic, Marc Kuchner, Frank Sienkiewicz, Josh Walawender
(Submitted on 18 Mar 2019)
This white paper advocates for the creation of a community-wide program to maintain precise mid-transit times of exoplanets that would likely be targeted by future platforms. Given the sheer number of targets that will require careful monitoring between now and the launch of the next generation of exoplanet characterization missions, this network will initially be devised as a citizen science project — focused on the numerous amateur astronomers, small universities and community colleges and high schools that have access to modest sized telescopes and off-the-shelf CCDs.
Comments: White Paper submitted to Astro2020 Science Call, 5 pages, 3 figures, community comments and involvement are welcome!
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1903.07716 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1903.07716v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Robert Zellem
[v1] Mon, 18 Mar 2019 20:58:24 UTC (396 KB)
