The NEID Doppler spectrometer at WIYN
Abstract
The US exoplanet science community urgently requires a radial velocity instrument with the sensitivity to observe rocky planets in the habitable zone, and follow-up the most promising TESS candidates. To address this need, we are building NEID, the new NN-Explore extreme precision Doppler spectrometer for the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak Observatory. The guiding metric for the complete design was the instrument’s performance for its primary science goal, the Doppler observation of Earth-like exoplanets. It is based on a high optical performance Echelle spectrograph built around a classical white pupil relay with large beam size, and is fed by a high-scrambling fiber train. NEID covers the wavelength range from 380 - 930nm in a single frame with a resolution of ~100.000. The optics bench is housed in a vacuum chamber for environmental control, reaching sub-millikelvin temperature stability. Together with a sophisticated front end to provide excellent atmospheric dispersion correction and guiding stability, this forms a system with predicted Doppler precision of <25 cm/s. In this talk, we will present the optical and optomechanical designs, and discuss the interplay of technical design choices and science demands.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #233
- Pub Date:
- January 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AAS...23340803S