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Freezer Boxes for Frequency Combs: The First Team Trip to HET
HPF team members Suvrath Mahadevan, Larry Ramsey, Eric Levi, and Paul Robertson just returned from our team excursion to McDonald Observatory in west Texas. The purpose of our trip was to set up an...
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HPF at the USA Science & Engineering Festival
This weekend the HPF group was hard at work at the 3rd USA Science & Engineering Festival, the largest celebration of science and engineering in the United States. Members of the HPF group also...
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The HPF Cryostat Design
Now that you know what HPF is, and what its primary science functions will be, let’s take a closer look at some of the hardware that makes the exciting science possible. The cryostat–basically, a...
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Keeping it Cool
The Habitable Zone Planet Finder, being an infrared spectrograph, must be kept from being saturated by infrared radiation emitted from the surroundings. This can be done by keeping the instrument...
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Gliese 581 and the Stellar Activity Problem
The primary science objective of HPF is to discover and confirm low-mass exoplanets in or near the habitable zones of nearby M dwarf stars. The technical challenge of such an endeavor is significant;...
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Astrofest 2014
Earlier this month (July 9 – July 12) was Penn State’s 16th Astrofest, a four night festival of Astronomy and Astrophysics were Penn State Astronomy students, faculty, and friends gave talks,...
View ArticleHPF Subsystem Assembly: Heater Panels and Thermal Straps
Fabrication of various subsystems related to HPF is well under way, and some of them have reached their final assembly stage. Below you can see a video of the final assembly in one of our clean rooms...
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More on stellar activity: an investigation of Gliese 667C
A few posts back, we explored how even with a highly precise planet-hunting instrument such as HPF, radial velocity noise from magnetic activity on our target stars may hinder our ability to detect...
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MLI Blankets
In recent weeks much progress has been made in making Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI) blankets for the HPF spectrograph. Below follows a video of some of the fabrication steps in the HPF clean-room lab:...
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The Color of Sunspots: Studying Solar Activity
In this blog, we have highlighted how stellar activity can hinder and even masquerade as planetary signals (see Gliese 581 and Gliese 667C). The stars discussed in those posts were important, not only...
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Fabrication of the Cryostat Vacuum Chamber
In order to preserve a cold, stable environment for the HPF optics, the entire instrument must be kept in a giant vacuum chamber, called a cryostat. The cryostat must seal out the ambient atmosphere...
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HPF Thermal Enclosure Setup at McDonald Observatory
Three members of the HPF team recently visited McDonald Observatory in Texas recently, with two goals in mind: Install the HPF thermal enclosure Setup a temperature monitoring system in the...
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The Year in Science: HPF Highlights 2014
It is important to remember that the team building HPF is not comprised of technicians dispassionately filling an order for a new machine, but instead includes many of the scientists who will...
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The 2 square-inch detector at the heart of HPF
A little history Among the variety of components that make up HPF, the mammoth 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope and the hefty 200lb diffraction grating are certainly the most imposing. Although these are...
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We Have a Cryostat
If you have been following the blog up to now, you have seen our discussion of the technical requirements and specifications for our cryostat — the giant, temperature-controlled vacuum chamber that...
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What to do when your star wanders
As we’ve mentioned in prior blog posts, high precision Doppler radial velocity (RV) measurements require extraordinarily stable instruments to measure the spectral shifts in the stellar absorption...
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The HPF cryostat test drive: sub-milliKelvin temperature stability
Background: the need to cool HPF down to 180K One of the most frequently discussed topics on this blog has been the need to enclose the HPF instrument in a stable, cold environment. Because HPF will...
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NEID, HPF’s sister spectrograph
Recently, the HPF team was selected to build the NEID spectrograph, the next generation spectrograph for the 3.5m WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, located on the Tohono O’odham...
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The Plot Thickens: Habitable-Zone Exoplanets around Proxima Centauri and...
Introduction As the time approaches to commission HPF on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, we are learning that the spectrograph will be coming online in truly exciting times for exoplanet science! The...
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Stellar Activity in the Near-Infrared: We Need a New Ruler!
Introduction We talk about stellar activity a lot on this blog. Once HPF gets on sky, radial velocity noise from stellar activity will likely be the biggest impediment to finding exoplanets. Thus, if...
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