Precise RVs at the 231st AAS Meeting: Tuesday

Good morning!  Here are some abstracts not to miss today:

Oral Presentations

10am, National Harbor 11: #111.01  Jason Eastman will talk about the first year of operations at MINERVA.  Jason and I have collaborated many times on EPRV projects, most notably our barycentric correction routine.  Jason is the project manager for MINERVA, our array of 4 small telescopes at Mt. Hopkins observing nearby bright stars at very high RV precision and with nightly cadence. Jason will talk about how we have addressed the challenges of fully automated robotic operations and what we will be able to accomplish in the coming years with MINERVA.

2pm, National Harbor 11: #128.01 Rob Wittenmyer will talk about MINERVA-Australis at USQ’s Mount Kent Observatory.  Rob is building a sister project in the south to MINERVA, which is now funded and coming along nicely. Together the two MINEVRA projects will monitor the entire sky for rocky planets orbiting our nearest neighbors. (graduating PhDs take note: Rob will be looking for a postdoc to join the team!)

 

Posters

#152.08 Sarah Logsdon will present the NEID Port Adapter. NEID (pronounced noo-id) is the new facility instrument for the WYIN 3.5m at Kitt Peak. It will be an extremely precise RV machine with < 30 cm/s instrumental precision. We are building it at Penn State now, but Sarah is working at NASA Goddard SFC with Michael McElwain on the interface between the telescope and the instrument. This is a crucial component that has to handle all of the guiding, tracking, focusing, and other components of injecting light into the NEID optical fiber to the extremely high precision and stability we required for our RV precision goals.

#152.18 Speaking of Penn State spectrographs, Joe Ninan will present the commissioning results for HPF, our near-infrared precise RV machine on HET. This is, as I like to say “HARPS in the NIR on a 10m”, although all 3 of those are slight exaggerations (1-3 m/s, ZYJ bands, 9m). HPF is commissioning now and Joe has been a crucial member of the commissioning team and will discuss the challenges of EPRV work with NIR detectors, and our solutions to these challenges.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *