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

像开普勒和TESS这样的太空任务正在或将发现大量围绕其他恒星的行星(“系外行星”)。目前还缺乏能够跟踪这些发现并测量系外行星本身性质的地面仪器。拉斯坎布雷全球天文台(LCOGT)的建设正在解决这一重大瓶颈，这是一个主要由1米望远镜组成的全球网络。LCOGT项目活跃在教育领域，开展了一项广泛的项目，让学生用望远镜观察。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，科学数据可供社区使用。该奖项将资助为LCOGT机器人回声光谱仪网络(NRES)建造6个相同的环境控制围栏，该网络目前正在NSF资助下建设。这些热外壳将确保NRES达到其径向速度稳定性的原始设计要求。NRES的及时完成将使对行星系统候选者的后续观测以及需要对相对明亮的目标进行高分辨率光谱分析的广泛科学成为可能。每个光谱仪都连接到两个可独立瞄准的1米机器人望远镜，这两个望远镜作为一个具有灵活调度能力的全球仪器发挥作用。

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.