Facility upgrades at the WIYN Observatory to support the operation of NEID
Abstract
NEID is an extreme precision Doppler spectrograph currently under commissioning at the 3.5m WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. One key to achieve NEID's unprecedented radial velocity precision (27 cm/s) is to reach an ultimate instrument stability. To prepare for the installation, commissioning, and science operation of NEID, a series of facility upgrades and tests have been done at WIYN. These include the construction of new cleanrooms to accommodate the NEID spectrograph and its calibration sources. The cleanrooms are equipped with a state-of-the-art HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system with demonstrated capability to keep the spectrograph room temperature fluctuations below ±0.2 degrees Celsius (short-term), or ±0.03 degrees Celsius (long-term, 8-hour rolling average). We also studied the vibration properties of the WIYN telescope using high-precision accelerometers and speckle imaging data taken on-sky. The information has been used to mitigate the telescope vibration in order to achieve the required guiding precision (50 mas RMS) of NEID. The performance of the facility upgrades at WIYN are shown here using data collected during the commissioning of NEID starting in November, 2019.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #235
- Pub Date:
- January 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AAS...23517520L