We present a description of a new instrument development, HARPS3, planned to be installed on an upgraded and roboticized Isaac Newton Telescope by end-2018. HARPS3 will be a high resolution (R = 115,000) echelle spectrograph with a wavelength range from 380-690 nm. It is being built as part of the Terra Hunting Experiment - a future 10 year radial velocity measurement programme to discover Earth-like exoplanets. The instrument design is based on the successful HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6m ESO telescope and HARPS-N on the TNG telescope. The main changes to the design in HARPS3 will be: a customised fibre adapter at the Cassegrain focus providing a stabilised beam feed and on-sky fibre diameter ~ 1.4 arcsec, the implementation of a new continuous flow cryostat to keep the CCD temperature very stable, detailed characterisation of the HARPS3 CCD to map the effective pixel positions and thus provide an improved accuracy wavelength solution, an optimised integrated polarimeter and the instrument integrated into a robotic operation. The robotic operation will optimise our programme which requires our target stars to be measured on a nightly basis. We present an overview of the entire project, including a description of our anticipated robotic operation.
@article{arxiv.1608.04611,
title = {HARPS3 for a Roboticized Isaac Newton Telescope},
author = {Samantha J. Thompson and Didier Queloz and Isabelle Baraffe and Martyn Brake and Andrey Dolgopolov and Martin Fisher and Michel Fleury and Joost Geelhoed and Richard Hall and Jonay I. Gonzalez Hernandez and Rik ter Horst and Jan Kragt and Ramon Navarro and Tim Naylor and Francesco Pepe and Nikolai Piskunov and Rafael Rebolo and Louis Sander and Damien Segransan and Eugene Seneta and David Sing and Ignas Snellen and Frans Snik and Julien Spronck and Eric Stempels and Xiaowei Sun and Samuel Santana Tschudi and John Young},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.04611},
year = {2016}
}