An autonomous telescope optimized for planet hunting . This is the Automated Planet Finder (APF), a 2.4-meter telescope located at the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton in California (USA) that is also the first robotic telescope dedicated to the search for habitable exoplanets such as the Kepler missions or DISH. It has already made its first discoveries since its commissioning in January 2014.
Before the Kepler mission, the search for planets relied on ground-based telescopes that looked at the stars one by one, such as the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, but the APF goes a step further. Thanks to him, it has been possible to delimit the orbits of exoplanets with the potential to host life , as well as to find out their mass.
Scientists need both techniques, space and land, to know the density of a planet and thus obtain clues about its composition. The disadvantage of ground-based telescopes is that they need constant supervision, an obstacle that is solved thanks to this robotic telescope that is 100% automated .
Every day when the Sun goes down, the system checks the weather, decides which stars to observe, and moves the telescope from star to star throughout the night , collecting measurements that reveal the presence of planets. The ultimate goal is to find Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of the universe.
The first two planetary systems found by the APF are not very interesting in themselves but they open the door to hope that at any moment this robotic telescope will make a great discovery. It’s just a matter of time.
