Displaying items by tag: EXOEarth project

The EXOEarths program aims at doing frontier research to explore:

• in unique detail the stellar limitations of the radial-velocity technique, as well as ways of reducing them, having in mind the detection of Earth-like planets
• to develop and apply software packages aiming at the study of the properties of the planet host stars, having in mind the full characterization of the newfound planets, as well as understanding planet formation processes.

These goals will improve our capacity to detect, study, and characterize new very low mass extra-solar planets. The results of this project will have a strong impact on the exploitation of future instruments, like the ESPRESSO spectrograph for the VLT. They will also be of extreme importance to current state-of-the-art planet-search projects aiming at the discovery of other Earths, in particular those making use of the radial-velocity method.

The project is called FINDS Exo-Earths (which stands for Fiber-optic Improved Next generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths).

The Planetary Society had teamed up with planet hunters Debra Fischer of Yale University and Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley to help with the quest to find other "Earths," other worlds like our own, elsewhere in our galaxy.

This high-end optical system was installed on the 3-meter telescope at the Lick Observatory and dramatically increased discoveries of smaller exoplanets and has been playing a crucial role in verifying Earth-sized planet candidates from the Kepler planet-hunter mission.

This is exactly the kind of project the Society has always excelled at. It's a small, vital effort, overlooked and under-valued by the space community's "Powers That Be." And we can see that it offers an incredible cost-benefit ratio.