NIRPS (Near Infra-Red Planet Searcher) is an AO-assisted and fiber-fed spectrograph for high precision radial velocity measurements in the YJH-bands. NIRPS also has the specificity to be an SCAO assisted instrument, enabling the use of few-mode fibers for the first time. This choice offers an excellent trade-off by allowing to design a compact cryogenic spectrograph, while maintaining a high coupling efficiency under bad seeing conditions and for faint stars. The main drawback resides in a much more important modal-noise, a problem that has to be tackled for allowing 1m/s precision radial velocity measurements. In this paper, we present the NIRPS Front-End: an overview of its design (opto-mechanics, control), its performance on-sky, as well as a few lessons learned along the way.
@article{arxiv.2207.14143,
title = {NIRPS Front-End: Design, performance, and lessons learned},
author = {N. Blind and U. Conod and A. de Meideros and F. Wildi and F. Bouchy and S. Bovay and D. Brousseau and A. Cabral and L. Genolet and J. Kolb and R. Schnell and A. Segovia and M. Sordet and S. Thibault and B. Wehbe and G. Zins},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.14143},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Proceeding of SPIE Telescopes+Instrumentation 2022