MACHETE: A transit Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope to survey half of the Very High Energy γ-ray sky

Current Cherenkov Telescopes for VHE gamma ray astrophysics are pointing instruments with a field of view up to a few tens of deg². We propose to build an array of two non-steerable telescopes with a FoV of 5×60 deg² oriented along the meridian. Roughly half of the sky drifts through this FoV in a year. We have performed a MC simulation to estimate the performance of this instrument, which we dub MACHETE. The sensitivity that MACHETE would achieve after 5 years of operation for every source in this half of the sky is comparable to the sensitivity that a current IACT achieves for a specific source after a 50 h devoted observation. The analysis energy threshold would be 150 GeV and the angular resolution 0.1 deg. For astronomical objects that transit over MACHETE for a specific night, it would achieve an integral sensitivity of 12% of Crab in a night. This makes MACHETE a powerful tool to trigger observations of variable sources at VHE or any other wavelengths.