MINERVA: A dedicated observatory for exoplanet science

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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.