- Okay. Thank you very much Tiffany. Now let's move to our next speaker. John Callas will tell us about the NASA and NSF partnership for exoplanet discovery and characterization. And again, I will give you a two minutes pre-warning before the end of your two minutes talk. Thank you. John, we cannot hear you.

- [John] Okay, let's get started. . Good morning everyone. It's great to be with you. I'm excited to share with you about NN-EXPLORE, which is the joint NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research program. So NN-EXPLORE has three main components. The first is what originally started it, which is the development of the WIYN spectrograph, which is now commissioned at the 3.5 meter WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak. And it has an associated guest observing program with the new WIYN instrument. We have a Southern RV observing opportunity, it allows access for US institutions to radio velocity observing time in the Southern hemisphere. And then more recently we have, we've been trying to advance an initiative to develop extreme precision radio velocity, lowering the threshold by which we can detect planets through the radial velocity techniques. And of course you can find much more about NN-EXPLORE at the website, which is indicated there below. But let me continue. So let me talk about NEID. So NN-EXPLORE was established in 2015 as an addendum to the memorandum of agreement between NSF and NASA. It was intended to fund the development of the next generation radio velocity spectrographs. So NASA funded the development of the NEID spectrograph, the associated telescope port adapter and the necessary telescope facility modifications to accommodate that spectrograph. And then ongoing, NASA funds the instrument operations, the maintenance, and the Guest Observer and Guaranteed-Time Observer program as well as the data processing and archiving. NSF for its contribution provides the 40% time that WIYN, on the WIYN telescope. So about 120 nights a year for NN-EXPLORE, and that's predominantly for the NEID instrument, but there's also the high resolution imaging instrument that's part of that allocation. NSF of course funds the telescope operations and maintenance and operates the time allocation committee for all proposals. Again, you can find more information about NN-EXPLORE, but specifically if you're interested in proposal opportunities, you can use the link below. So what is NEID? Well, NEID of course is an acronym and it stands for NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy. So it's pronounced NEID. And it's the native O'odham word to discover or to visualize. So this is an acknowledgement that the peak is on the tribal lands for the O'odham people. The intent is to have a device that's capable of a radial velocity precision below 30 centimeters per second. It covers a very wide spectral bandwidth from the deep blue to the near infrared. So 380 to 930 nanometers. It's a high resolution spectrographic seating at a 100,000. It uses a very large, single CCD, single camera of 9,000 by 9,000 pixels. It's in a exquisitely stable environmental chamber with very little pressure, but precise, absolutely precise temperature maintenance. And that it uses a laser frequency column along with an echelle for precise calibration. And you can see in the optical diagram below, the overall size of this spectrometer, it is quite large. Now here's some images. So you can see one of the young contributors to the development of this standing next to the vacuum tank. On the upper right you can see the lower portion, which calls the liquid nitrogen tank. The top cover in the lower left, and it all put together in the right there. So we are talking about a large system with large objects. So the off-axis paraboloid to the upper left, the shell grading. It's a two by one shell grading, about 80 centimeters in length. The lower left is the very large prism which weighs about 150 pounds. And then the camera that houses that single array detector. When it's all put together, it looks like a small submarine. It weighs about two and a half tons. So we have to move it on airlines, of course, but it's down installed in the basement of the wind telescope at Kitt Peak. And here is the picture of the wind telescope. You can see with the dome open and you can just see the edge of the telescope inside, the supporting facilities. In the upper right you can see the inset of the 3.5 meter telescope itself. Here just snapshots of the refurbishment that was necessary at the telescope to accommodate. NEID has to go into a clean room, you see that in the upper left. And it also has to have very good temperatures stability. So we have three layers of temperature stability for this instrument. We have the room itself, we have an enclosure for the spectrograph and then we have the tank, the submarine like feature you just saw which provides the finest level of temperature control. Below right you can see the extensive HVAC system that was necessary to provide support for this clean room and spectrograph graph operation. Here is the telescope itself, but mounted on the side of the telescope is the port adapter. Essentially the front end optics for the system. In many ways, the port adapter is optically more complicated than the spectrograph itself. It actually has more optical elements. And its function is to grab the light from the telescope and feed it into the fiber that makes its way all the way down into the basement of the telescope. We've added a solar telescope to this. Here's a picture of it on the edge of the building at WIYN, which allows us to take solar observations during the day and stellar observations at night. So essentially the spectrograph is collecting data 24 hours a day, continuously. And this will provide us with a magnificent dataset of solar observations, which will be a wonderful standard candle or baseline for analyzing stellar activity and advancing precision radial velocity. So we did have first light over a year ago. And here on the left you can see the shell spectrograph, you can see the individual orders that show up and you can then zoom in, which you see in the right. And you can see that we have three fibers that project onto the detector. The very left, the dots are the dots from the laser frequency column. So that puts down our standard ruler right on the spectrograph. Next to it is the science fiber. So this is the stellar observation that you're doing. And you can see a pair of absorption lines right there. And then to the right, which is blank, which is good, is we just staring at the sky. So we bring in the sky component till our observation, till our contributions, stray light, you know, moon brightness, and clouds and things like that. So here's some of our commissioning data. And so on the left you'll see a set of standard stars, the sun at the bottom. And in the early days of commissioning, and I'll caution, the spectrograph was still being stabilized during this period because it takes a long time for it to get down to its thermal stability. But even so you can see that total end-to-end RMS uncertainties are well below the half meter per second, which was our true environment. And so we're seeing exquisite performance out of the spectrograph. We finished commissioning back in June and already we have four papers that are published with exciting results. And here's one of them, which is a Rossiter McLaughlin measurements, or looking at the orbital inclination of an exoplanet. This is a warm Jupiter, GJ 3470B. And it's orbiting a nearby low mass star, but it has a polar orbiter, a polar orbit, excuse me. Polar orbit, which is really exciting. It's not what we would have expected, but this is some of the dramatic results that we've gotten very quickly with a spectrograph that operating so precisely. So again, if you're interested in observing time on the, with the NEID instrument on when, please go to the NN-EXPLORE website and learn about how you can propose for observing time. Okay. The next component of NN-EXPLORE, which is more recent edition is that we have worked with several facilities in the Southern hemisphere to get time for US institutions to using radio velocity instruments on those apertures. And you can see here in the table, we have three. We have SMARTS Chiron, the 1.5 meter. SMARTS Chiron in Chile. We had some early observations with AAT Veloce, which is a four meter aperture in Australia, but more recently we've added MINERVA Australis, which is an array of small apertures that, also in Australia. And so once again, you know, NASA funds the observing time of each facility, but the NSF is operating the TAC for each of these observing opportunities. And I think the program is expected to continue through 2027, 2027A in particular. I'm just showing you up through 2023A in the table. And you can learn more about the observing opportunities available, again, at the website or through the NN-EXPLORE website.

- [IIaria] Sorry, John you have two minutes to go.

- I'm sorry, two minutes? Okay.

- [IIaria] Yeah, two.

- And then the third component is the effort in extreme radial, extreme precision radio velocity. So the national academies came out with the exoplanet science strategy that encouraged NASA and NSF to pursue extreme precision rated velocity. We took, we responded to that by forming a working group of international experts. You can see a photograph of many of the participants in the bottom there. We established eight subgroups from each of the relevant disciplines within extreme precision radio velocity. We had three face-to-face workshops all before the pandemic. And of course, almost an uncountable number of teleconferences since then to develop a roadmap that recommends, that we recommended and presented to NASA and NSF. We did a presentation back in March, 2020, and then more recently issued a final report with all the details in August of 2021. You can find those reports and those presentations on the NN-EXPLORE website or at the specific URLs there. And what we have done are, the early steps we have taken is that we are moving ahead with precision radial velocity. So with NEID coming online, we're making the NEID solar data publicly available. You can go to the NExScl web page, the URL is right there, and access the NEID solar data today, as well as the NEID standard stars. Over the last two years, NSF has funded 17 EPRV specific instrumentation and technology awards. And last year NASA funded eight, two year Fundamental Sciences ROSES Solicitation awards. And again, you can, the URL is there for anyone who wants to look those up. So we were moving out on analysis and investigation and exploration in this. We've updated the, we've submitted updates to the NASA Technology Gap List with specific recommendations for EPRV. We've hired an investigation scientist at JPL, it's Jen Bert. And reforming the research coordination network. And we're just starting to get that going to pull in the people that are doing research in this area to build a collaboration. And we expect to use the data that we've been collecting to offer a data challenge in the next year or so. So with that, I'll stop there and pause for any questions.

- Thank you very much John. Awesome time. There was a question on the chat for the previous talk, but I think it's more generally relevant to also this talk. Whether the slides will be available to the community. And the answer is yes. The presentations will be posted both to the Google Driver and to the Xopec website. Okay? I do not see any questions directly to you. There is a question I'll have... Oh, okay. Here it is. What is the longer term future of the EPR initiative and its funding, and how the funding looks like?

- Okay, that's a very important question. Now that the decadal is out. Extreme precision radio velocity, like many of the observational programs, has a clear line to support a future flagship mission. So we are working with the various groups that are looking to see what work we need to do to support that flagship submission. So we're actively involved with the Maturation Program as well as the precursor science, the development of precursor science that goes along with the recommendations of the decadal.

- Okay. Thank you very much John again, and we need to move to the next speaker with David Chad.