EPRV Research Coordination Network
Welcome!
The EPRV Research Coordination Network (RCN), sponsored by NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program, aims to support increased communication and collaboration within the radial velocity community as we work towards the goal of obtaining robust mass measurements for Earth analog planets.
Membership is open to the community and we invite participants from all corners of the RV community and related fields, including but not limited to: observational efforts, instrumentation, data analysis techniques, solar studies, and stellar variability mitigation. Please see the side bar for instructions / links on how to join the RCN.
Note: All members of the EPRV RCN will be required to follow our Code of Conduct
Input Requested - Updates to EPRV Working Group Recommendations
The RCN steering committee is requesting member input on the Recommendations and Road Map included in the EPRV Working Group’s Final Report (Crass et al. 2021). That report provided NASA and NSF with an in depth study of what would be required to advance global EPRV capabilities to the level of detecting Earth analogs. NASA would like to understand how the EPRV field has advanced in the last few years and which of these recommendations may need to change / evolve based on that progress.
An executive summary can be found on pages 1-7 of the report, which includes a list of overall recommendations and a near-term road map. The report also provided specific recommendations from the EPRV Technology and Data Analysis sub-groups. We have captured these four sets recommendations in the four tabs of this spreadsheet for ease of access.
The steering committee is soliciting broad inputs, including but not limited to:
- Suggestions of new Recommendations or Road Map steps
- Updates to any of the existing recommendations or road map steps
- Updates to the current state of the field regarding any of the recommendations / road map steps
We have set up a Google Form to collect input here, but also invite folks to submit suggestions directly via email to jennifer.burt@jpl.nasa.gov. Please use the subject line “EPRV Working Group Updates” so that we can collect responses more easily.
Suggested updates (both via email and the Google Form) will be accepted through December 20, 2024.
Background on the RCN
The 2018 National Academies’ Exoplanet Science Strategy, which provided input to the Astro 2020 Decadal Survey, acknowledged the importance of the radial velocity method “to provide essential mass, orbit, and census information to support both transiting and directly imaged exoplanet science for the foreseeable future” and recommended that “NASA and NSF should establish a strategic initiative in extremely precise radial velocities (EPRV) to develop methods and facilities for measuring the masses of temperate terrestrial planets orbiting Sun-like stars.” Subsequently, a community Extreme Precision Radial Velocity (EPRV) Working Group was chartered, which developed a roadmap for advancing the radial velocity technique to the point where EPRV detection or exclusion of Earth analogs orbiting nearby target stars of a future direct imaging mission would be feasible.
With the Astro2020 Decadal Survey recommendation for NASA to develop a large infrared/optical/ultraviolet space telescope capable of observing and spectrally characterizing potentially habitable exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, development of EPRV capabilities is critical as they will provide the only method potentially capable of discovering Earth analogs from the ground and measuring their masses. As part of its plan to “break the stellar variability barrier” and work towards enabling EPRV surveys capable of measuring the masses of Earth analogs, the EPRV WG report recommended that NASA establish an EPRV Research Coordination Network (RCN) of scientists across disciplines (solar, stellar, exoplanetary) and instruments.“ Thus, the development of this RCN, which endeavors to support the EPRV community in advancing towards the goal of detecting temperate, terrestrial, planets around Sun-like stars.