The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network plans to deploy two or three identical 1-meter remote-controlled telescopes, each costing about US$1 million, at observatories in Hawaii, Chile, South Africa, Australia and the Canary Islands.

They will soon be stitched into a global network that will provide researchers with around-the-clock coverage of quickly changing objects such as extrasolar planets, asteroids and supernovas.

LCOGT has three priorities: tracking the motion of candidate exoplanets found by NASA’s Kepler space telescope; measuring the decay of light from supernovae to help reduce uncertainties in the estimates of dark energy; and pinpointing the trajectories of near-Earth asteroids.