Design and Performance of NEID Ultra-Stable Environmental Control System

NEID is a NASA & US NSF funded ultra-stable, optical spectrometer designed to achieve Radial Velocity (RV) precision on the order of 10cm/s. Achieving this level of measurement precision requires extreme thermo-mechanical stability within the instrument which we achieve by maintaining a vacuum on the order of microTorr as well as sub-milliKelvin temperature stability. In this poster, we will outline NEID's Environmental Control System (ECS) and Temperature Monitoring and Control (TMC) System, which were both inherited and improved upon from that of the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) infrared spectrograph. We have achieved our target stability by demonstrating < 0.4mK RMS temperature variability over the course of a 30 day stability run in the lab. We expect our stability to improve at the observatory as the WIYN instrument room is more stable than our instrument development lab at Penn State. NEID will be commissioned in Fall 2019 at Kitt Peak National Observatory on the 3.5m WIYN Telescope. It will serve the exoplanet community as a vital resource for the detection and confirmation of low-mass exoplanets.