EXPERT and MARVELS

Subject: EXPERT and MARVELS 6th December 2009, 5:16 pm

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009AAS...21340504C

Quote :: A Network of Extremely High Precision Extrasolar Planet Tracker Instruments
Chang, Liang; Ge, J.; Wan, X.; Zhao, B.; Groot, J.; Jiang, P.; Fleming, S.; Lee, B.; Mahadevan, S.; Hanna, K.; Hearty, F.
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #405.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.197; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.197
We present a plan to build a network of extremely high precision Doppler instruments based on a dispersed fixed-delay interferometer to hunt for super-Earth mass planets around nearby solar type stars. This kind of instrument is called EXtremely Precision ExtrasolaR planet Tracker (EXPERT). It consists of a thermally compensated monolithic interferometer and a high throughput cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph with a spectral resolution of R=18,000. The wavelength range is between 0.39-0.7 µm and is completely covered by a 4Kx4K CCD detector. This allows us to reach 0.5-1 m/s Doppler precision for a V=8 solar type star in a 15 min exposure with a 2m class telescope. The plan is to build three identical instruments and place one in the US, one in China and one in Spain to form an initial EXPERT network. The first one will be ready for commissioning at a 2m telescope in the US in the spring of 2009. The second one will be ready for commissioning on a Chinese 2.4m telescope in the summer of 2009. The third one may be ready for commissioning at a Spanish telescope in late 2009 or 2010 depending on funding availability. In the lab, we have reached 0.4 m/s Doppler precision with a monolithic interferometer and a bright light source. The same kind of interferometer has been installed in the Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey (MARVELS) instrument and has provided 2 m/s precision with bright calibration sources using only 600 Angstroms wavelength coverage and R=10,000. Project progress will be presented.

When began observations? How much stars are planned observe? Searching for of the small planets?

Subject: Re: EXPERT and MARVELS 6th December 2009, 5:38 pm

From nearby topic about APF

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/astro2010/DetailFileDisplay.aspx?id=194

Quote :: The upcoming UCO/Lick 2.4-m Automated Planet Finder (APF) telescope was funded
through a DOD grant and will be an important component of the California-Carnegie
team’s strategy toward the detection of rocky planets. The APF will be fed stars
harvested from the large target lists of the Lick and Keck survey. These will be stars that
are highly pre-selected, already known to be quiet enough to reveal earth-mass planets,
yet have larger velocity variations than they should be based on their activity indexes
(and hence probably showing a planet signal). With such highly pre-selected candidates,
the intense cadence of the APF will then quickly be able to lock onto the period, and dig
out the small signals through brute sampling statistics (monitoring a strictly periodic
signal against a background of white noise). Unfortunately, at only 2.4-m aperture, the
APF will require ~45-minute exposures at V ~ 6 to achieve 1 m/s. So a 2.4-m telescope
can only survey the ~100 nearest stars with difficulty. Moreover, it cannot do better than
1 m/s because a 2.4-m telescope simply does not deliver enough photons.