Detecting transiting exoplanets with a low-cost robotic telescope system

Project PANOPTES (Panoptic Astronomical Networked Observatories for a Public Transiting Exoplanets Survey) is working to develop a worldwide network of individually-built, low-cost robotic telescope units that continuously image the night sky to observe transiting extrasolar planets. The fourth-ever completed PANOPTES unit, PAN012, was built in 2018 by two students at the California Institute of Technology and used to make a successful detection of the planet HD 189733 b. This presentation outlines our continuation of their work, successfully deploying the unit to a permanent location on Mt. Wilson where it conducts transit observations and sky surveys nightly. We also discuss the process of designing and testing a weatherproofing system prior to the unit's deployment, overcoming challenges faced during its remote operation, and extracting transit signals from its latest observations using the cloud-based PANOPTES data processing pipeline. Now fully-operational, the PAN012 unit continues to gather valuable data on both known and potential transiting systems, possibly facilitating hundreds of new exoplanet discoveries in the future.