Transiting Exoplanets

By continuously monitoring a quarter of the full celestial sphere all night, every night, at high cadence, spatial resolution, and photometric precision, HATPI will be able to detect a large number of exoplanetary transit events. HATPI is an especially powerful tool for finding the infrequent transits of long period, cold Jupiters that can take years or more to orbit their stars.

Transient Events

The high cadence and ultra-wide field-of-view of HATPI give it a unique sensitivity to fast astronomical transient events that may be missed by other time-domain surveys that observe the full sky at a much lower cadence. HATPI is expected to observe many bright transients, like nearby supernovae, Galactic novae, or kilonovae, providing valuable observations during the rise time before they are detected by other surveys.

Variable Stars

HATPI will produce long-term, high-cadence light curves for 10s of millions of stars, enabling the study of hundreds of thousands of variable stars. It will be especially useful for detecting very long period stellar eclipsing binary systems, routinely measuring the rotation periods of a vast number of sun-like stars, detecting stellar flares, and studying stellar activity cycles and long-term mode changes in pulsating stars.

Moving Objects

HATPI will observe 1000s of Near-Earth asteroids every year, and will be particularly sensitive to very small nearby asteroids that would otherwise go undetected. It will also be useful for providing light curves of asteroids that can be used to measure their rotation periods and characterize their shapes.