SPECULOOS

SPECULOOS (for Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-cool Stars, the acronym is a pun on a type of cookie) aims to discover Earth-sized extra-solar planets orbiting 1000 nearby ultracool dwarfs i.e., M dwarfs and cooler. It consists of six 1-meter telescopes at three locations. The initial location (SPECULOOS Southern Observatory, SSO, at Paranal Observatory on the Atacama Desert in Chile) consists of four telescopes and began operation in January 2019. Subsequently in 2019, operation began at the other two sites, which are in the northern hemisphere: one telescope (SPECULOOS Northern Observatory, SNO) at Teide Observatory on the Canary Islands, Spain, and one telescope (the SAINT-EX telescope, for "search and characterization of transiting exoplanets") at the National Astronomical Observatory at San Pedro Mártir, Mexico.

SPECULOOS uses the transit method of detection. The telescopes cover the near infrared because much of the electromagnetic radiation from these stars will be in that range. It would seem these are possible candidates for direct imaging in the future: the dim stars would make that easier but the their habitable zone would be very close to the star.