NN-explore Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler (NEID) Spectrograph (NEID)

A collaborative partnership between NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) has produced the NEID spectrometer, which makes extremely precise measurements of the wobbles of stars caused by the planets that orbit them. NEID will be used to characterize exoplanets discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and to discover new exoplanets that will be targets of future NASA missions to make direct images of nearby worlds. The NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) partnership, a collaboration to advance exoplanet science, commissioned the NEID Spectrometer in response to the astronomical community’s desire for a publicly accessible, extremely precise Doppler spectrometer. The primary goal of NEID is to provide ultra-precise Doppler measurements of nearby stars to: (1) enable precise mass measurements of new exoplanets discovered by TESS, and (2) facilitate the discovery of nearby exoplanets that will be targets of next-generation NASA space missions to obtain direct images of exoplanets. NEID is installed on the 3.5-meter WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

NEID entered full science operations in August 2021. Thanks to the NN-EXPLORE partnership, astronomers around the world may propose to use NEID for a wide variety of experiments related to exoplanet detection and characterization. This opportunity represents the first time that a significant fraction of a telescope’s available time has been made publicly accessible for use of an ultra-precise Doppler instrument. Projects for which NEID is especially useful include surveys to discover new exoplanets, mass measurements of planets found to transit (eclipse) their host stars, and determination of the misalignment between the orbital axis of a planet and the rotational axis of the host star. NEID’s world-class precision allows such measurements to be made with a speed and level of detail not possible with previous generations of Doppler spectrometers.

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