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. The primary goal of PASS is the detection of all transiting giant planets in the entire sky, complete for stellar systems of magnitudes ∼5.5–10.5. Since the sample stars are fairly bright and relatively close, planets detected by PASS would be ideally suited for any follow‐up study with ground‐ or space‐based instrumentation. The survey would also allow the pursuit of a variety of work on temporal astronomical phenomena of any kind and is intended to lead to a permanent all‐sky tracking of variable stars with high temporal resolution. The instrument consists of arrays of CCD cameras with wide‐field optics that cover the entire sky visible from their observing locations. Calculations of the instrument’s noise sources and subsequent simulations indicate that the proposed design is able to achieve the prime objective of a full‐sky survey for transits. An equation for the signal‐to‐noise ratio from photometry of unguided stellar images is given in the Appendix, together with equations for the detection probability of planetary transits based on the observational coverage and the instrument’s duty cycle.