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.

MINERVA是位于Mt.霍普金斯，亚利桑那州致力于寻找和表征类地行星周围最接近，最明亮，最有趣的恒星。通过这个奖项，PI的目标是利用MINERVA发现一些围绕明亮恒星的低质量行星。这些新发现的行星将是详细研究的最佳目标之一，这将有助于我们了解我们在银河系中的位置。MINERVA使用四个小型望远镜比使用一个具有相同有效尺寸的望远镜更具成本效益。 它还创造了灵活性，可以使用部分阵列来实现雄心勃勃的教育和公共宣传计划，主要针对少数民族本科生，天文台10%的时间用于此。越来越清楚的是，行星的数量随着行星质量和半径的减小而迅速增加。 MINERVA项目将通过在专用望远镜上使用专用仪器对少数精心挑选的目标进行密集观测，从而发现明亮恒星周围的新行星。它将使用四个0.7米自动化商业望远镜在山。霍普金斯，亚利桑那州，同时饲料高精度径向速度摄谱仪。设计目标是找到低质量行星所需的最先进的（1 m/s）多普勒精度，这将通过将碘波长参考与光纤馈电的本质稳定的光谱仪相结合来实现。 由于所有的观测时间都致力于这一目标，因此可以将大量的时间专门用于每一颗星星，以减轻恒星抖动的有害影响。基于对探测极限和行星种群的模拟，研究小组预计将在明亮（3.5 V 8.5）的eta地球样本中发现约14颗新的低质量行星，这些行星围绕80颗恒星，色球不活跃的GKM恒星。这些新行星将是未来地面仪器和太空任务详细描述的理想目标。