We present the scientific motivation and conceptual design for the recently funded Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), a stabilized fiber-fed near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph for the 10 meter class Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) that will be capable of discovering low mass planets around M dwarfs. The HPF will cover the NIR Y & J bands to enable precise radial velocities to be obtained on mid M dwarfs, and enable the detection of low mass planets around these stars. The conceptual design is comprised of a cryostat cooled to 200K, a dual fiber-feed with a science and calibration fiber, a gold coated mosaic echelle grating, and a Teledyne Hawaii-2RG (H2RG) NIR detector with a 1.7μm cutoff. A uranium-neon hollow-cathode lamp is the baseline wavelength calibration source, and we are actively testing laser frequency combs to enable even higher radial velocity precision. We will present the overall instrument system design and integration with the HET, and discuss major system challenges, key choices, and ongoing research and development projects to mitigate risk. We also discuss the ongoing process of target selection for the HPF survey.
@article{arxiv.1209.1686,
title = {The Habitable-Zone Planet Finder: A Stabilized Fiber-Fed NIR Spectrograph for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope},
author = {Suvrath Mahadevan and Lawrence Ramsey and Chad Bender and Ryan Terrien and Jason T. Wright and Sam Halverson and Fred Hearty and Matt Nelson and Adam Burton and Stephen Redman and Steven Osterman and Scott Diddams and James Kasting and Michael Endl and Rohit Deshpande},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1209.1686},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
14 pages, 9 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the SPIE 2012 Astronomical Instrumentation and Telescopes conference