A comprehensive Doppler error budget for next generation, extreme precision spectrometers

Published

August 9, 2016

Author(s)

Ryan C. Terrien, Samuel Halverson, Suvrath Mahadevan, Arpita Roy, Chad Bender, Guomundur K. Stefansson, Andrew Monson, Eric Levi, Fred Hearty, Cullen Blake, Michael McElwain, Christian Schwab, Lawrence Ramsey, Jason Wright, Sharon Wang, Qian Gong, Paul Robertson

Abstract

We describe a detailed radial velocity error budget for the NASA-NSF Extreme Precision Doppler Spectrometer instrument concept NEID (NN-explore Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler spectroscopy). Such an instrument performance budget is a necessity for both identifying the variety of noise sources currently limiting Doppler measurements, and estimating the achievable performance of next generation exoplanet hunting Doppler spectrom- eters. For these instruments, no single source of instrumental error is expected to set the overall measurement floor. Rather, the overall instrumental measurement precision is set by the contribution of many individual error sources. We use a combination of numerical simulations, educated estimates based on published materials, extrapolations of physical models, results from laboratory measurements of spectroscopic subsystems, and informed upper limits for a variety of error sources to identify likely sources of systematic error and construct our global instrument performance error budget. While natively focused on the performance of the NEID instrument, this modular performance budget is immediately adaptable to a number of current and future instruments. Such an approach is an important step in charting a path towards improving Doppler measurement precisions to the levels necessary for discovering Earth-like planets.

Proceedings Title

SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation online proceedings for 2016 conference

Conference Dates

June 26-July 1, 2016

Conference Location

Edinburgh

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

exoplanets, high resolution spectroscopy, radial velocity instrumentation, systems engineering

Citation

Terrien, R. , Halverson, S. , Mahadevan, S. , Roy, A. , Bender, C. , Stefansson, G. , Monson, A. , Levi, E. , Hearty, F. , Blake, C. , McElwain, M. , Schwab, C. , Ramsey, L. , Wright, J. , Wang, S. , Gong, Q. and Robertson, P. (2016), A comprehensive Doppler error budget for next generation, extreme precision spectrometers, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation online proceedings for 2016 conference, Edinburgh, -1 (Accessed October 18, 2025)