The latest transit survey to announce their first planet is the Next Generation Transit Survey. While the planet NGTS-1b has a fairly normal mass and radius for a hot Jupiter, it is unusual in being found transiting an M0-type dwarf, a star of only 0.6 solar radii. Thus the planet is nearly a quarter as big as the star, in terms of radius, the highest planet-to-star ratio yet found.

NGTS is an array of twelve 20-cm telescopes sited at Cerro Paranal in Chile, and has been accumulating survey data since 2016.

It is important to realise that the newer survey NGTS does not supersede WASP, but instead complements it, being designed to do a different task. WASP, and similar surveys such as HATnet and KELT, use camera lenses (typically 200-mm f/1.8 or 85-mm f/1.2) to survey large swathes of sky. The data is good enough to detect transits of Jupiter- and Saturn-sized planets, but not smaller ones.

NGTS was designed to find smaller planets, down to Neptune and possibly super-Earth size. To do that it uses bigger optics, being telescopes rather than camera lenses, with a much better plate scale (more CCD pixels per chunk of sky). This gives much better photometry, but at the price of a much smaller field of view. A smaller field of view means covering many fewer bright stars.

Indeed, NGTS has a field of view comparable to the Kepler field (1% of the sky), though since it will raster several fields it will add up to sky coverage comparable to that of the Kepler K2 mission phase.

Thus WASP, running with 200-mm lenses surveying much of the sky, finds Jupiters and Saturns transiting stars of typically V = 9 to 13. NGTS can find smaller planets, and is aimed at finding Neptunes, but will likely find them transiting fainter stars of typically V = 13 to 14 (and perhaps, as with K2, an occasional brighter one).

Meanwhile, WASP-South has recently been running with wider, 85-mm lenses, which cover the whole Southern sky and target stars of V = 6.5 to 11.5. Hence the two surveys are entirely complementary: WASP aiming for large, Jupiter-sized planets around very bright stars, while NGTS aims for Neptune-sized planets around much fainter stars.

The main competition for WASP is now KELT and MASCARA, whereas the main competition for NGTS is the ongoing K2 mission. Of course NASA’s forthcoming TESS mission, set for launch in 2018, should out-compete all of the ground-based surveys.