MINERVA: A dedicated observatory for exoplanet science

MINERVA：系外行星科学专用天文台

• 批准号: 1516242
• 负责人: John Johnson
• 金额: $ 46.88万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-10-01 至 2019-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1516242&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: MINERVA; dedicated; observatory; exoplanet; science

MINERVA is a robotic observatory at Mt. Hopkins, Arizona dedicated to searching for and characterizing Earth-like planets around the closest, brightest, and most interesting stars. Via this award, the PI aims to use MINERVA to discover a number of low-mass planets around bright stars. These newly discovered planets will be among the best targets for detailed studies that will help us understand our place in our own Milky Way Galaxy. MINERVA's use of four small telescopes is more cost effective than a single telescope with the same effective size. It is also creates the flexibility to use part of the array to achieve an ambitious education and public outreach program, largely aimed at minority undergraduate students, to which 10% of the observatory's time is dedicated. It is becoming clear that the number of planets increases rapidly with decreasing planet mass and radius. Project MINERVA will discover new planets around bright stars by intensely observing a handful of carefully-selected targets with purpose-built instrumentation at a dedicated telescope. It will use four 0.7 meter roboticized commercial telescopes at Mt. Hopkins, Arizona to simultaneously feed a high precision radial velocity spectrograph. The design goal is state-of-the-art (1 m/s) Doppler precision necessary to find low-mass planets, which will be achieved by combining an iodine wavelength reference with a fiber-fed, intrinsically stable spectrograph. With all of the observing time dedicated to this goal, significant time can be dedicated to each star in order to mitigate the deleterious effects of stellar jitter. Based on simulations of detection limits and planet populations, the team expects to find ~14 new low-mass planets around 80 stars in the eta Earth sample of bright (3.5 V 8.5), chromospherically inactive GKM stars. These new planets will be ideal targets for detailed characterization by future ground-based instrumentation and space missions.

密涅瓦（Minerva）是亚利桑那州霍普金斯山（Mt. Hopkins）的机器人天文台，致力于在最接近，最亮，最有趣的恒星周围寻找和表征类似地球的行星。通过该奖项，PI旨在使用密涅瓦（Minerva）发现围绕明亮恒星的许多低质量行星。这些新发现的行星将成为详细研究的最佳目标之一，这些目标将有助于我们以自己的银河系方式理解自己的位置。密涅瓦（Minerva）使用四个小型望远镜的使用比具有相同尺寸相同的单个望远镜更具成本效益。 它还创造了灵活性，可以利用一部分阵列来实现雄心勃勃的教育和公共宣传计划，这主要针对少数群体本科生，这是该天文台10％的时间专门的。很明显，随着行星质量和半径的减少，行星数量迅速增加。 Minerva项目将通过在专用望远镜上强烈地观察到少数精心设计的目标，从而发现明亮恒星周围的新行星。它将在亚利桑那州霍普金斯山（Mt. Hopkins）使用四个0.7米机器人化的商业望远镜，以同时喂养高精度的径向速度光谱仪。设计目标是找到低质量行星所需的最新（1 m/s）多普勒精度，这将通过将碘波长参考与纤维喂养的，本质上稳定的光谱图相结合来实现。 随着所有专门用于这个目标的观察时间，可以将大量时间用于每个星星，以减轻恒星抖动的有害影响。基于检测极限和行星种群的模拟，该团队希望在ETA地球样品（3.5 V 8.5）中发现约14个新的低质量行星，大约80颗恒星（3.5 V 8.5），色相圈无活性的GKM恒星。这些新行星将是通过将来的基于地面的仪器和太空任务详细表征的理想目标。