A Network of Extremely High Precision Extrasolar Planet Tracker Instruments

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

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.

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