The habitable-zone planet finder: a stabilized fiber-fed NIR spectrograph for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

By S. Mahadevan, L. Ramsey, C. Bender, R. Terrien, Jason T. Wright, S. Halverson, F. Hearty, M. Nelson, A. Burton, S. Redman and 5 more. Other Conferences, 2012

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the scientific motivation and conceptual design for the recently funded Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), a stabilized fiber-fed near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph for the 10 meter class Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) that will be capable of discovering low mass planets around M dwarfs. The HPF will cover the NIR Y and J bands to enable precise radial velocities to be obtained on mid M dwarfs, and enable the detection of low mass planets around these stars. The conceptual design is comprised of a cryostat cooled to 200K, a dual fiber-feed with a science and calibration fiber, a gold coated mosaic echelle grating, and a Teledyne Hawaii-2RG (H2RG) *NIR detector with a 1.7μm cutoff. A uranium-neon hollow-cathode lamp is the baseline wavelength calibration source, and we are actively testing laser frequency combs to enable even higher radial velocity precision. We will present the overall instrument system design and integration with the HET, and discuss major system challenges, key choices, and ongoing research and development projects to mitigate risk. We also discuss the ongoing process of target selection for the HPF survey.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbd889d004f956f77540f04cd5834c5cb805cd25

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Winn
2. D. Charbonneau
3. J. Johnson
4. D. Fabrycky
5. R. Kopparapu
6. R. Dawson
7. C. Lovis
8. J. Southworth

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. J. Winn
2. Daniel Foreman-Mackey
3. Debra A. Fischer
4. F. Pepe
5. C. Lovis
6. F. Bouchy
7. A. Reiners
8. T. Robinson

Citations in the corpus

• A REVISED ESTIMATE OF THE OCCURRENCE RATE OF TERRESTRIAL PLANETS IN THE HABITABLE ZONES AROUND KEPLER M-DWARFS (2013, background): “…et al. (2013) have also estimated HZ boundaries around other stellar spectral types, including M stars, which are primary targets for ongoing surveys such as Habitable Zone Planet Finder (Mahadevan et al. 2012, HPF) and MEarth (Nutzman & Charbonneau 2008) to discover potential habitable planets.”
• The Occurrence and Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems (2014, background): “They include traditional optical spectrographs well suited for FGK dwarfs (e.g., ESPRESSO, Pepe et al. (2010); G-CLEF, Szentgyorgyi et al. (2012); CODEX, Pasquini et al. (2008) as well as new infrared spectrographs more appropriate for M dwarfs (IRD, Tamura et al. (2012); CARMENES, Quirrenbach et al”
• HABITABLE ZONES AROUND MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS: NEW ESTIMATES (2013, background): “Several other surveys are either underway (Nutzman & Charbonneau 2008, MEARTH) or getting ready to be commissioned (Mahadevan et al. 2012, HPF) in an attempt to discover rocky planets in the HZs of low mass stars.”
• The CARMENES Search for Exoplanets around M Dwarfs: A Low-mass Planet in the Temperate Zone of the Nearby K2-18 (2018, background): “There are several on-going and future precise RV surveys whose main goal is to search for terrestrial planets around M dwarfs, including CARMENES (Quirrenbach et al. 2014), HPF (Mahadevan et al. 2012), IRD (Tamura et al. 2012), NIRPS (Bouchy et al. 2017), and SPIRou (Artigau et al. 2014).”
• State of the Field: Extreme Precision Radial Velocities (2016, methodology): “Future RV Programs In addition to these ongoing Doppler planet searches, there are several funded new spectrometers that will come online in the few years, including the first node of Network of Robotic Echelle Spectrographs (NRES) on the LCOGT telescopes in 2015 with a target RV precision of 3 m s−”