The Binocular Large Area Survey Telescope

With the BLAST project proposed here we plan to install two (with a goal of four) high-resolution wide-field cameras at the main observational sites on the Canary Islands, La Palma and Tenerife. With these cameras we will be able to survey 1%(2%) of the sky at high temporal resolution of seconds to a few minutes with the three main scientific goals: 1) Discovering and monitoring the bright, early phases of short-lived astrophysical transients such as gravitational-wave detected kilonovae, fast radio bursts and gamma-ray bursts, 2) measuring Jupiter-like exoplanet transits, and 3) monitor and track Earth impacting meteors. This survey will provide a very competitive edge to other existing and future facilities that survey the sky at a far slower cadence of one to several days. This project is an experiment to test the efficiency of this kind of detection system, with the intend to upscale the setup to cover the whole sky, if successful. This setup will have a great synergy with the new instrumentation currently being developed for the Nordic Optical Telescope at La Palma, allowing us to follow-up and characterize the detected transients on unprecedented timescales.