PARAS survey

India begins to actively hunt for planets!

http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.4280
PARAS (PRL Advanced Radial-velocity All-sky Search)

Quote :

The 1.2m telescope is located at Mt. Abu, India, and we are guaranteed about 80 to 100 nights a year for observations with the spectrograph. The instrument will be ultimately used for radial-velocity searches of exoplanets around 1000 dwarf stars, brighter than 10th magnitude, for the next 5 years with a precision of 3 to 5m/s using the simultaneous Th-Ar spectral lamp reference technique. The spectrograph has already achieved a stability of 3.7m/s in short-term time scale and in the near future we expect the stability to be at 1m/s once we install the spectrograph inside the vacuum chamber.

Quote :

The Echelle spectrograph was built in late 2009 and early 2010 and the spectrograph was commissioned and saw first light in February 2010.