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S. H. Rhie, D. P. Bennett (Notre Dame)
We simulate a ground based search for terrestrial extra-solar planets using a wide field-of-view telescope situated at an excellent observing site such as Paranal. We assume that several complete Galactic bulge seasons are devoted exclusively to the planet search program using a planned wide field-of-view telescope such as the VST or VISTA. The gravitational microlensing signals of terrestrial planets are visible only in the light curves of main sequence stars, and these stars are too crowded to be individually resolved in the dense central Galactic bulge fields which have the highest gravitational microlensing rates. Nevertheless, it is possible to detect the gravitational microlensing signals of some terrestrial planets in light curves measured from excellent observing sites such as Paranal. However, the full duration of the planetary microlensing signals of Earth mass planets is about 1-day, so the lightcurves measured from a Paranal survey are incomplete. Thus, the parameters of the detected planets cannot generally be determined, and it is often not possible to rule out non-planetary light curve deviations as the cause of the detected signals. For a small subset of high magnification events it is possible to fully characterize the planetary deviations, but the overall sensitivity of these ground based surveys is only about 1% of that of a space based survey. The ground based surveys also have no sensitivity to the planetary abudance as a function of separation.