Biosignatures & Paleobiology

EXPRES: A Next Generation RV Spectrograph in the Search for Earth-like Worlds

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.IM
June 15, 2016
Filed under
EXPRES: A Next Generation RV Spectrograph in the Search for Earth-like Worlds
Water world

The EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph (EXPRES) is an optical fiber fed echelle instrument being designed and built at the Yale Exoplanet Laboratory to be installed on the 4.3-meter Discovery Channel Telescope operated by Lowell Observatory.

The primary science driver for EXPRES is to detect Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars. With this in mind, we are designing the spectrograph to have an instrumental precision of 15 cm/s so that the on-sky measurement precision (that includes modeling for RV noise from the star) can reach to better than 30 cm/s.

This goal places challenging requirements on every aspect of the instrument development, including optomechanical design, environmental control, image stabilization, wavelength calibration, and data analysis. In this paper we describe our error budget, and instrument optomechanical design.

C. Jurgenson, D. Fischer, T.McCracken, D. Sawyer, A. Szymkowiak, A.B. Davis, G. Muller, F.Santoro
(Submitted on 14 Jun 2016)

Comments: 20 pages, 20 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation proceedings paper
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:1606.04413 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1606.04413v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Colby Jurgenson
[v1] Tue, 14 Jun 2016 15:10:16 GMT (3818kb)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04413

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