Miniature exoplanet radial velocity array I: design, commissioning, and early photometric results

The MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA) is a US-based observational facility dedicated to the discovery and characterization of exoplanets around a nearby sample of bright stars. MINERVA employs a robotic array of four 0.7 m telescopes outfitted for both high-resolution spec- troscopy and photometry, and is designed for completely autonomous operation. The primary science program is a dedicated radial velocity survey and the secondary science objective is to obtain high precision transit light curves. The modular design of the facility and the flexibility of our hardware allows for both science programs to be pursued simultaneously, while the robotic control software provides a robust and efficient means to carry out nightly observations. In this article, we describe the design of MINERVA including major hardware components, software, and science goals. The telescopes and photometry cameras are characterized at our test facility on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, CA, and their on-sky performance is validated. New observations from our test facility demonstrate sub-mmag photometric precision of one of our radial velocity survey targets, and we present new transit observations and fits of WASP-52b—a known hot-Jupiter with an inflated radius and misaligned orbit. The process of relocating the MINERVA hardware to its final destination at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona has begun, and science operations are expected to commence within 2015

First radial velocity results from the MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA)

The MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA) is a dedicated observatory of four 0.7m robotic telescopes fiber-fed to a KiwiSpec spectrograph. The MINERVA mission is to discover super-Earths in the habitable zones of nearby stars. This can be accomplished with MINERVA's unique combination of high precision and high cadence over long time periods. In this work, we detail changes to the MINERVA facility that have occurred since our previous paper. We then describe MINERVA's robotic control software, the process by which we perform 1D spectral extraction, and our forward modeling Doppler pipeline. In the process of improving our forward modeling procedure, we found that our spectrograph's intrinsic instrumental profile is stable for at least nine months. Because of that, we characterized our instrumental profile with a time-independent, cubic spline function based on the profile in the cross dispersion direction, with which we achieved a radial velocity precision similar to using a conventional "sum-of-Gaussians" instrumental profile: 1.8 m s$^{-1}$ over 1.5 months on the RV standard star HD 122064. Therefore, we conclude that the instrumental profile need not be perfectly accurate as long as it is stable. In addition, we observed 51 Peg and our results are consistent with the literature, confirming our spectrograph and Doppler pipeline are producing accurate and precise radial velocities.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, submitted to PASP, Peer-Reviewed and Accepte

Miniature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array I: design, commissioning, and early photometric results

The Miniature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA) is a U.S.-based observational facility dedicated to the discovery and characterization of exoplanets around a nearby sample of bright stars. MINERVA employs a robotic array of four 0.7-m telescopes outfitted for both high-resolution spectroscopy and photometry, and is designed for completely autonomous operation. The primary science program is a dedicated radial velocity survey and the secondary science objective is to obtain high-precision transit light curves. The modular design of the facility and the flexibility of our hardware allows for both science programs to be pursued simultaneously, while the robotic control software provides a robust and efficient means to carry out nightly observations. We describe the design of MINERVA, including major hardware components, software, and science goals. The telescopes and photometry cameras are characterized at our test facility on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California, and their on-sky performance is validated. The design and simulated performance of the spectrograph is briefly discussed as we await its completion. New observations from our test facility demonstrate sub-mmag photometric precision of one of our radial velocity survey targets, and we present new transit observations and fits of WASP-52b—a known hot-Jupiter with an inflated radius and misaligned orbit. The process of relocating the MINERVA hardware to its final destination at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona has begun, and science operations are expected to commence in 2015

A planet within the debris disk around the pre-main-sequence star AU Microscopii

AU Microscopii (AU Mic) is the second closest pre main sequence star, at a distance of 9.79 parsecs and with an age of 22 million years. AU Mic possesses a relatively rare and spatially resolved3 edge-on debris disk extending from about 35 to 210 astronomical units from the star, and with clumps exhibiting non-Keplerian motion. Detection of newly formed planets around such a star is challenged by the presence of spots, plage, flares and other manifestations of magnetic activity on the star. Here we report observations of a planet transiting AU Mic. The transiting planet, AU Mic b, has an orbital period of 8.46 days, an orbital distance of 0.07 astronomical units, a radius of 0.4 Jupiter radii, and a mass of less than 0.18 Jupiter masses at 3 sigma confidence. Our observations of a planet co-existing with a debris disk offer the opportunity to test the predictions of current models of planet formation and evolution.Comment: Nature, published June 24th [author spelling name fix

Development Of A Route Guidance Generation System For Real-Time Application

. This paper describes the route guidance generation component of DynaMIT, a dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) system intended for deployment in a traffic center and capable of generating real-time prediction-based guidance information. After providing a general overview of the system, the paper discusses the principal theoretical and algorithmic issues which influenced the development of its guidance generation component. Keywords. Kalman filter, networks, routing algorithms, simulators 1. INTRODUCTION DynaMIT (Dynamic Network Assignment for the Management of Information to Travelers) is a real time dynamic traffic assignment system that provides traffic predictions and travel guidance. Travel guidance refers to information provided to tripmakers in an attempt to facilitate their decisions relative to departure time, travel mode and route. Clearly, departure time and (to some extent) travel mode information is only effective prior to trip departure, whereas route guidance recommendatio..