Production and deployment of environment-controlled enclosures for the Network of Robotic Echelle Spectrographs

大量围绕其他恒星运行的行星（“系外行星”）正在被开普勒和TESS等太空任务发现或即将被发现。目前缺乏能够追踪这些发现并测量系外行星本身特性的地面仪器。这一重大瓶颈正在被拉斯康布雷斯天文台全球望远镜（LCOGT）的建设所解决，这是一个主要由1米望远镜组成的全球网络。LCOGT项目在教育方面很活跃，开展了一个广泛的项目，让学生用望远镜进行观测。从高中到大学四年级的许多学生都被聘为实习生。为LCOGT开发的设计是开源的，科学数据也向社区提供。该合同将为LCOGT机器人梯队光谱仪网络（NRES）建造6个相同的环境控制外壳，该网络目前正在由美国国家科学基金会资助建设。这些热罩将确保NRES达到其原始设计要求的径向速度稳定性。NRES的及时完成将使后续对行星系统候选天体的观测以及对相对明亮目标的高分辨率光谱的广泛科学研究成为可能。每个摄谱仪都连接到两个独立的1米机器人望远镜，作为一个具有灵活调度能力的单一全球仪器。

A large number of planets around other stars ("exoplanets") are being discovered or will be discovered by space missions like Kepler and TESS. There is a shortage of ground-based instruments that can follow up on these discoveries and measure the properties of the exoplanets themselves. This significant bottleneck is being addressed by the construction of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT), a worldwide network of primarily 1-meter telescopes. The LCOGT project is active in education, operating an extensive program of student observing on their telescopes. Numerous students from high-school to university seniors are employed as interns. Designs developed for LCOGT are open-source, and science data are made available to the community.This award will fund the construction of 6 identical environment-controlled enclosures for the LCOGT Network of Robotic Echelle Spectrographs (NRES), which is currently under construction with NSF funding. These thermal enclosures will ensure that the NRES reaches its original design requirement for radial velocity stability. Timely completion of NRES will enable follow-up observations of planetary system candidates as well as a wide range of science requiring high-resolution spectroscopy of relatively bright targets. Each spectrograph is coupled to two independently-targetable 1-meter robotic telescopes that function as a single, global instrument with flexible scheduling capabilities.