Igniting a New Era of Planet Discovery with FHiRE: A Precision Spectrograph at the WIRO Telescope

Nearly 3,500 planets are now confirmed in close to 3000 other planetary systems. For the vast majority of these systems only a single planet is known, and only a tiny minority have accurately measured masses. Astrophysical research teams formerly satisfied with exoplanet discovery are now beginning to ask deeper questions about planetary system architecture. Is our solar system structure typical? What processes shape the formation and evolution of planetary systems? These questions can be answered by measuring orbits and masses for multiple planets in many systems. The University of Wyoming's 2.3-meter WIRO (Wyoming Infrared Observatory) telescope is ideally suited to acquire the long-term, high-cadence observations that will be required to make progress in this frontier area of astrophysics. The field of exoplanet discovery is poised to grow rapidly, so much so that NASA has begun funding spectrographs at ground-based observatories, and JWST and WFIRST will spend much of their missions characterizing planets. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission will launch in 2018 and discover at least 5000 nearby small exoplanet candidates around bright stars during its 2-year mission. Since TESS will only carry out photometry to detect brightness variations during a planet transit in front of a host star, a great deal of ground-based work will be needed to eliminate false positives and measure the masses of bona fide planets. Specifically, planet masses will be measured using high-resolution spectroscopy by detecting radial velocity (RV) signatures, or the Doppler “wobble” of the host star as it is pulled by its orbiting planet. NASA estimates that several hundred candidates will require intensive spectroscopic observations. Knowing exoplanet masses is necessary before astronomers, collaborating with geologists, atmospheric scientists, and exobiologists, can infer their densities, chemical compositions, and atmospheres. This is truly an interdisciplinary field, offering UWyo astronomers a golden opportunity to create collaborations with these other scientists both within UWyo and externally. We propose to build and install a new echelle spectrograph, the Fiber High Resolution Echelle spectrograph (FHiRE), at WIRO which stands to play a major role in the coming decades of planet spectroscopy. Funding from this EPSCOR proposal would enable us to transform a basic echelle spectrograph having a velocity precision of about 100 m/s into a planet-hunting powerhouse with the 1 m/s precision required to detect Jupiter or Saturn analogs around Sun-like stars, or an Earth-mass planet in a 10-day orbit around a low-mass star. The key to achieving this high precision is the construction of a vacuum chamber for FHiRE to stabilize the spectrograph with a temperature-stabilized Thorium-Argon lamp for precise velocity calibration. Addition of a next-generation octagonal optical fiber will also help achieve this benchmark. With these upgrades, we can achieve 1 m/s RV precision, enabling us to find Solar System analogs and embark on a decades-long research program in support of NASA satellite missions. The technologies involved are well-understood and in use currently on other planet-hunting spectrographs such as the European HARPS. During the three-year grant period, our team will complete the FHiRE instrument, commission it, write the necessary data reduction software, and embark on a long-term exoplanet survey in collaboration with NASA centers and the TESS Follow-up Observing Program (TFOP). Specifically, we will join the Recon Spectroscopy and Precise Radial Velocity Work sub-groups. By working with the TFOP teams, we will coordinate our efforts with the TESS Science Team and other groups around the world.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.