TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope)

Abstract

TRAPPIST is a 60-cm robotic telescope that was installed in April 2010 at the ESO La Silla Observatory. The project is led by the Astrophysics and Image Processing group (AIP) at the Department of Astrophysics, Geophysics and Oceanography (AGO) of the University of Liège, in close collaboration with the Geneva Observatory, and has been funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). It is devoted to the detection and characterisation of exoplanets and to the study of comets and other small bodies in the Solar System. We describe here the goals of the project and the hardware and present some results obtained during the first six months of operation.