Description
Planet transit searches promise to be the next breakthrough for extrasolar planet detection and will bring the characterization of short-period planets into a new era. Every transiting planet discovered will have a measured radius, which will provide constraints on planet composition, evolution, and migration history. Together with radial velocity measurements, the absolute mass of every transiting planet will be determined. In this paper we discuss the design considerations of the Extrasolar Planet Occultation Research (EXPLORE) project, a series of transiting planet searches using 4-m class telescopes to continuously monitor a single field of stars in the Galactic plane in each ~2 week observing campaign.
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