NEID is an optical, Extreme-Precision Radial Velocity (EPRV) spectrometer installed at the WIYN 3.5 m Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ, USA. Primarily designed to find, confirm, and characterize planets outside of the solar system, NEID was built as part of the joint NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research Program (NN-EXPLORE). Through the NN-EXPLORE program, ~50% of WIYN science time is made available to the public through standard NOIRLab bi-annual proposal calls. The other approximately 50% of WIYN science time is available to WIYN institutional partners. NEID entered full science operations in 2021B and is operated in queue mode, with a team of dedicated NEID Queue Observers carrying out nighttime operations. Currently, the NEID queue makes up approximately 70-80% of the available WIYN telescope time, with the other approximately 20-30% of the time made up of a combination of classically and queue scheduled time on other instruments. Operating NEID in queue mode is crucial for executing high cadence programs such as the publicly available NEID Standard Star program. Here we discuss the lessons learned in the early years of instituting and running a modern queue at a telescope that maintains some classical observing. We will give an overview of the software and staffing required to effectively run the queue and how we have both upgraded the software and modified operational procedures to increase efficiencies.
This presentation discusses the design and performance of the recent upgrade to the fiber positioning robot in Hydra, a multi-object spectrograph at the WIYN 3.5m telescope. After 31 years of operation, and more than two decades as the mainstay of optical spectroscopy at WIYN, the workhorse instrument was unreliable and difficult to maintain. The new “gripper” robot is twice as fast as the previous version, substantially reducing night time lost to reconfiguring fiber fields. Additionally, the two previously most common error modes, dropping fibers and failing to grab fibers, both of which required manual intervention, have been eliminated thanks to the introduction of machine vision and an improved sensing system. Hydra21 uses industrial standard electronics (programmable logic controllers, PLCs) which are extremely reliable and allow for straightforward future software upgrades, including the possibility of accommodating new fibers of different sizes. The PLC framework also provides detailed telemetry, and easy access to low level commands for diagnostic and maintenance work. This presentation also reports on the formation of a new partnership between the academic and government funded observatory and an industrial automation firm (PROD Design & Analysis, Inc, based out of El Paso, Texas). This partnership provided us the flexibility to combine in-house expertise with contracted engineering resources and will be a template for ongoing modernization of the WIYN observatory. Lessons learned from working with a vendor who was new to astronomical instrumentation are shared, though we emphasize our ultimate success.
NEID (NN-explore Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler spectroscopy) is an optical, fiber-fed spectrometer at the WIYN 3.5m Telescope. NEID’s single-measurement radial velocity precision (27 cm/s) requires the stellar image motion (induced by atmospheric turbulence) to be controlled for 90% of the time to within 50 milli-arcseconds in nominal observing conditions. This has been achieved by fast guiding through the NEID Port Adapter, which implements an EMCCD and a tip/tilt piezo stage to capture/stabilize the stellar image. Here, we use on-sky data accumulated over a year to demonstrate the performance of this system under diverse observing conditions.
Here we detail the on-sky performance of the NEID Port Adapter one year into full science operation at the WIYN 3.5m Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. NEID is an optical (380-930 nm), fiber-fed, precision Doppler radial velocity system developed as part of the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) partnership. The NEID Port Adapter mounts directly to a bent-Cassegrain port on the WIYN Telescope and is responsible for precisely and stably placing target light on the science fibers. Precision acquisition and guiding is a critical component of such extreme precision spectrographs. In this work, we describe key on-sky performance results compared to initial design requirements and error budgets. While the current Port Adapter performance is more than sufficient for the NEID system to achieve and indeed exceed its formal instrumental radial velocity precision requirements, we continue to characterize and further optimize its performance and efficiency. This enables us to obtain better NEID datasets and in some cases, improve the performance of key terms in the error budget needed for future extreme precision spectrographs with the goal of observing ExoEarths, requiring ∼ 10 cm/s radial velocity measurements.
The NEID extreme precision radial velocity spectrometer is in operation at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope located at the Kitt Peak National Observatory, Tucson, Arizona. This newly-commissioned instrument serves both the national exoplanet research community as well as the WIYN consortium partners. In order to meet the stringent 27 cm per second radial velocity precision[1], and in particular to maximize the efficiency of the 5-year radial velocity survey, it is critical to understand the WIYN telescope vibration environment. In this presentation, we describe the vibration measurement techniques and results used for quantifying the vibration of: the telescope ancillary equipment, the telescope mount, the telescope primary mirror cooling systems, the telescope instruments, wind, and other sources and their effect on the telescope image. Additionally, mitigation methods, current and planned are discussed. This work continues on from a previous paper at this conference[2], where we presented data gathered from accelerometers on WIYN to begin identifying major features in the vibration spectra and simulate the input to the tip-tilt correction system for the NEID fiber-feed. The WIYN telescope has a well-ventilated and compact dome that ensures excellent seeing, but is also prone to wind-shake. For wind-related vibrations in particular, it is important to model the structural modes to design mitigation strategies and here we discuss possible experimental methods and data analysis techniques to address this. This work will be relevant to upgrade and retrofit efforts as older observatories incorporate low-order wavefront correction to stabilize light to advanced spectrometers and imagers. See Li et al. (this conference).
NEID is an optical, fiber-fed, precision Doppler radial-velocity spectrometer system located at the WIYN 3.5 meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, intended for open-access use within the US national community. NEID was designed to achieve 50 cm/s or better radial velocity precision, permitting the characterization of terrestrial mass exoplanets orbiting host stars identified by recent NASA missions such as TESS. NEID will be used during 40-50% of all observing time at WIYN and will operate in a queue scheduled mode. The NEID queue will enable astronomers to make frequent adjustments to their individual observing programs within the NEID queue. NEID's observing constraints were developed with high-precision RV exoplanet studies as the primary use case, but enable a variety of observing schemes. Here, we describe the scheduling and queue algorithms and how queue users can configure their programs to meet science goals.
The NEID extreme precision radial velocity spectrometer is being commissioned at the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope, Kitt Peak National Observatory, Tucson Arizona. In order to meet the stringent 27 cm per second radial velocity precision, the light to NEID comes from an extremely stable fiber feed, called the NEID Port Adapter, equipped with fast tip-tilt correction. The WIYN telescope vibration environment and the Port Adapter tip-tilt and guiding system are key to achieving the 50 milliarcsecond-level centroiding stability required. Here we describe the servo system performance, along with vibration analysis and mitigation plans. This work would be relevant to upgrade and retrofit efforts as older observatories incorporate low-order wavefront correction to stabilize light to advanced spectrometers and imagers.
In October 2019, the NEID instrument (PI Suvrath Mahadevan, PSU) was delivered to the WIYN 3.5 m Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. Commissioning began shortly after delivery, but was paused due to a COVID-19 imposed observatory shutdown in March 2020. The observatory has recently reopened and NEID commissioning has resumed. NEID is an optical (380-930 nm), fiber-fed, precision Doppler radial velocity system developed as part of the NN-EXPLORE partnership. While the spectrometer and calibration system are maintained in a highly controlled environment on the basement level of the WIYN, the NEID Port Adapter mounts directly to a bent-Cassegrain port on the telescope and is responsible for precisely and stably placing target light on the science fibers. Here we present a brief overview of the as-built Port Adapter and its sub-components. We then discuss preliminary on-sky performance compared to requirements as well as next steps as we complete commissioning.
The NEID spectrometer is an optical (380-930 nm), fiber-fed, precision Doppler spectrometer currently in de- velopment for the WIYN 3.5 m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory as part of the NN-EXPLORE partnership. Designed to achieve a radial velocity precision of < 30 cm/s, NEID will be sensitive enough to detect terrestrial-mass exoplanets around low-mass stars. Light from the target stars is focused by the telescope to a bent Cassegrain port at the edge of the primary mirror mechanical support. The specialized NEID “Port Adapter” system is mounted at this bent Cassegrain port and is responsible for delivering the incident light from the telescope to the NEID fibers. In order to provide stable, high-quality images to the science instrument, the Port Adapter houses several sub-components designed to acquire the target stars, correct for atmospheric dis- persion, stabilize the light onto the science fibers, and calibrate the spectrometer by injecting known wavelength sources such as a laser frequency comb. Here we provide an overview of the overall opto-mechanical design and system requirements of the Port Adapter. We also describe the development of system error budgets and test plans to meet those requirements.
NEID is a new extreme precision Doppler spectrometer for the WIYN telescope. It is fiber fed and employs a classical white pupil Echelle configuration. NEID has a fiber aperture of only 0.92” on sky in high-resolution mode, and its tight radial velocity error budget resulted in very stringent stability requirements for the input illumination of the spectrograph optics. Consequently, the demands on the fiber injection are challenging. In this paper, we describe the layout and optical design of the injection module, including a broadband, high image quality relay and a high-performance atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) across the bandwidth of 380 – 930 nm.
The NEID Port Adapter is the interface between the WIYN 3.5m Telescope and the NEID fiber-fed spectrometer. The spectrometer requires the stellar jitter to be controlled for 90% of the time to within 50 milli-arc seconds for visual magnitudes 12, and 200 milli-arc seconds for V-magnitudes 12-16. The NEID Port Adapter will use an Andor EMCCD with 13 micron pixels, and a tip/tilt piezo stage from nPoint with a lowest resonant mode of 479 Hz. We expect to meet the requirement with a closed-loop rate of 27 Hz. We have data taken at the WIYN telescope consisting of stellar centroids captured at a rate of 108.75 Hz, which we rebin to test the response at lower sampling rates. We present the results of feeding these waveforms into the nPoint controller and measuring the actual response.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.