A robotic telescope leveraging global science from Veloce

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This project aims to Implement RAPTOR, a dedicated, robotic telescope allowing the use of state-of-the-art Veloce spectrograph. This project will leverage substantial value from Australia’s existing investment in the Veloce facility by allowing Veloce’s use on the 290 nights per year when the Anglo-Australian Telescope is being used by other instruments. Veloce+RAPTOR will enable a new class of transformative science that demands high-cadence, repeated observations over many nights. Expected outcomes include a broad sampling of the properties of exoplanets around nearby stars, critical for informing theories of planet formation, as well as new data addressing a wide range of astronomical questions requiring high-resolution optical spectroscopy of bright stars. Combined with data from the $300m Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, and leveraging the existing $5.9m investment in the Veloce instrument, the RAPTOR telescope will place Australia at the forefront of the global pursuit of the question of how common life is in the Universe.