The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Astrophysics Division has reportedly chosen a team of astronomers from Pennsylvania State University to build the next-generation planet finder. The $10 million project will guide NASA's future efforts toward finding evidence of life and detect planets outside the solar system.
The Penn State team, led by the university's astronomy and astrophysics assistant professor Suvrath Mahadevan, was selected after an intense national competition. According to Space Daily, the team will build a state-of-the-art precision instrument as a partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) called the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research program or NN-EXPLORE.
The instrument is known as NEID or NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy and will be reportedly completed in 2019. It will be installed on the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
"The NEID instrument is a critical part of NASA's partnership with NSF; this state-of-art precision instrument will enable the community to search for new worlds using the WIYN Telescope," NASA Astrophysics Division Director Paul Hertz said. "We look forward to many new discoveries that can then be further explored using NASA's space telescopes."
By using NEID, astronomers will be able to measure a star's tiny back-and-forth wobble, which is caused by the gravitational tug of a planet in orbit around it. The wobble will then help scientists identify if there's a planet orbiting the star while its size will indicate how massive the planet is.
"NEID will be more stable than any existing spectrograph, allowing astronomers around the world to make the precise measurements of the motions of nearby, Sun-like stars," astronomy and astrophysics associate professor Jason Wright said in an interview with Phys.org. "Our team will use NEID to discover and measure the orbits of rocky planets at the right distances from their stars to host liquid water on their surfaces."
Meanwhile, Mahadevan has also expressed his excitement regarding Penn State's involvement in the lastest NASA project. Onward State also reveals that Mahadevan shared the impact of the new instrument on the field as a whole.
"We are privileged to have been selected to build this new instrument for the exoplanet community," Mahadevan said. "This is a testament to our multi-institutional and interdisciplinary team of talented graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and senior scientists... NEID is a transformative capability in the search for worlds like our own."
Meanwhile, NEID was derived from a word that means "to discover" in the language of the Tohono O'odham tribe. The said group governs the land where Kitt Peak is located, Engadget learns.
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