Quest for the Millikelvin: Thermal Stability for the MARVELS Planet Survey Instrument

Details Quest for the Millikelvin: Thermal Stability for the MARVELS Planet Survey Instrument Quest for the Millikelvin: Thermal Stability for the MARVELS Planet Survey Instrument

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21340503s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #405.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.197

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Scientific paper

Radial velocity stability is critical for a successful exoplanet survey. The first Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey (MARVELS) instrument of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) III program was developed using a thermally compensated monolithic interferometer and a moderate resolution spectrograph (R=10,000). Our goal is to produce about 10m/s long-term radial velocity stability, which can greatly simplify calibration procedures. To achieve this, a stable thermal environment is critical. Thermal analysis pointed us to areas that may need higher levels of stability, and gave us a theoretical bound for thermal stability. Bearing this in mind, we designed an environmental enclosure and control system to keep the instrument temperature and pressure stable. Early measurements during the MARVELS instrument commissioning show we have reached about 6 mK peak to valley thermal stability for the entire instrument per day over a few weeks. These results have proved system stability adequate to eliminate simultaneous iodine absorption cell calibration, enhancing throughput and eliminating difficult data pipeline development efforts. We compare laboratory results and tests with early commissioning data to demonstrate the improvements in radial velocity measurements that can be achieved by creating a stable environment. Further testing has also allowed us to pinpoint other problematic areas which threaten thermal stability and therefore radial velocity precision. It is quite possible that 1 mK or better thermal stability can be reached with future improvements in our control scheme. This improved thermal control hardware and software will be applied to future generations of extremely high precision Doppler instruments, which have aims to reach sub m/s precision.
We would like to thank the W.M. Keck Foundation, Sloan Foundation, NSF, NASA and UF for support.

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