(Wide Angle Search for Planets, Wide Area Search for Planets)
(multi-university initiative to locate transiting planets)
WASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets, sometimes cited
as Wide Area Search for Planets)
is a project of a number of universities to discover
extra-solar planets using the transit method.
A pilot operation began in 1999 using a robotic telescope.
Later improvements have led to two sites in the
two hemispheres, each with an array of telescopes,
the improved version called SuperWASP.
Well over a hundred planets have been discovered,
some of high research interest.
Note the WASP prefix may refer to a discovery
before or after the SuperWASP improvements.