how to maximize the yield of planets?

There were discussions this week at University of Warwick about the Terra Hunting Experiment strategy and likely detection capability. Various take-homes include that we need to mitigate lots of stellar noise, and that we care deeply about the covariance (as a function of separation in time) of adjacent measurements. I advocated that we split our ten-year survey into two or three surveys, of varying length. In the first, we learn about the stars, and in the last, we go to town on the very most promising targets. There was general agreement that this is a good idea. But now we need a very specific plan for what this means. As my loyal reader knows, in my view, the decisions must be based on repeatable operations, so that we have some hope of learning statistical things about populations in the end.