THE NEXT GENERATION TRANSIT SURVEY PROTOTYPING PHASE

The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a new wide-field transiting exoplanet survey aimed at discovering Neptune and super-Earth size exoplanets around bright (V < 13) nearby stars. NGTS consists of an array of 12 robotically operated telescopes observing in the 600 - 900 nm band. NGTS will survey more than five times the number of stars with V < 13 than Kepler and will therefore provide the brightest targets for characterisation with existing and future instrumentation (VLT, E-ELT and JWST). In 2009/10, a prototype for NGTS was tested on La Palma, proving that such a system can meet our goals of essentially white noise limited photometry of bright stars, the results of which are summarised here. NGTS builds on the experience of the SuperWASP project, which, for many years, has lead the ground-based detection of transiting exoplanets.