AAS 203rd Meeting, January 2004
Session 17 Extra Solar Planets
Poster, Monday, January 5, 2004, 9:20am-6:30pm, Grand Hall

[Previous] | [Session 17] | [Next]


[17.02] New Results from the RV instrument, Exoplanet Tracker, at the KPNO 2.1m

C. DeWitt, J. Ge, S. Mahadevan, J. Van Eyken, D. Ren, G. Friedman (PSU)

This poster presents preliminary results from the commissioning of the radial velocity survey instrument, Exoplanet Tracker (ET), at the Kitt Peak 2.1m telescope. ET is a fiber-fed, fixed-delay Michelson interferometer followed by a medium resolution (R=10000) volume phase holographic spectrograph for the visual band. It will be open to the public for RV related research. ET's total throughput from above the atmosphere to the detector is about 30%, 5-10 times higher than the current cross-dispersed echelle spectrometers for Doppler planet searches. In this instrument, Doppler shifts are tracked by measuring phase changes in the interference fringes of the stellar lines against the interferometer comb, instead of measuring line shifts directly as in the echelle approach.

A prototype of this instrument has also already confirmed 2 extra-solar planet curves (51 Peg and upsilon Andromeda), detected by previous surveys with echelles. Our Doppler precision with the prototype is 7.9 m/s measuring for a RV standard star, eta Cas. Our goal is to reach 1-3 m/s with the survey instrument.

This work has been supported by the NSF with grant AST-0243090, the Penn State Eberly College of Sciences and JPL.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: dewitt@astro.psu.edu

[Previous] | [Session 17] | [Next]

Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.