The MEarth Project (pronounced mirth[1]) is a United States NSF-funded[2] robotic exoplanet observatory that is part of the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins. The project monitors the brightness of thousands of red dwarf stars with the goal of finding transiting planets. As red dwarf stars are small, any transiting planet blocks a larger proportion of starlight than transits around a Sun-like star would, allowing smaller planets to be detected through ground-based observations.[3]