India’s Perspective on Exoplanet Research

1. India’s Perspective on Exoplanet Research Suvrath Mahadevan on behalf of Abhijit Chakraborty, Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Department of Space, India

2. India’s Perspective • India is a relative newcomer to modern exoplanet research • On going strategy • Near Term (within next 1yr) • Highly stable fiber fed spectrograph, PARAS, being commissioned at the Mt Abu 1.2m telescope in Jan 2010 • Long Term (next 5-10 years) possibilities • Dedicated 2-2.5 m robotic telescope with PARAS for precision RV followup • Possibilities of Space Missions in very preliminary discussion stage

3. http://www.isro.org/chandrayaan/htmls/mission_sequence.html Polar Satellites Launch Vehicle (PSLV). Payload consists of instuments built by ISRO, ESA, NASA, and some other organizations. ChandraYaan-1 Spacecraft, India’s Moon Mission

4. PARAS PRL Advanced Radial Velocity All Sky Search • Fiber-Fed Spectrograph • Built to be very stable • Fiber fed • Temperature stabilized, and in a vacuum enclosure • Star and Th-Ar on different fibers, so simultaneous calibration of Instrument Drift Th-Ar Star PARAS, India’s First high efficiency stable echelle spectrograph will be coupled to the Mt Abu 1.2 telescope PARAS Team includes Abhijit Chakraborty (PI), F.M Pathan, Venkatramani, S Mahadevan (PSU), Harvey Richardson (UBC), Arpita Rao, SAC & PRL Engineers

5. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph • 80 nights per year guaranteed to planet search program with PARAS • Median site seeing is 1arcsec. PARAS fiber on sky is 2.35 arcsec- so VERY efficient instrument. • 150n/yr photometric, ~250 clear night PARAS coupled to the Mt Abu 1.2 m telescope Instrument Commissioning on site Jan 2010

6. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph • PARAS is a R=70k resolution Echelle spectrograph • Comissioning Jan 2010 • Mt Abu 1.2 Telescope in India • 370-850nm simultaneous coverage • Th-Ar Calibration • Fiber Fed • White Pupil Design • Prism Cross-Diperser 100 mm Beam R4 Grating Chakraborty, Richardson & Mahadevan, SPIE 2008

7. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph 370 nm 850nm Wide Simultaneous Wavelength Coverage with a 4k x 4k deep depletion e2v CCD. CaII HK-Ca NIR Triplet coverage in one shot. PBM8Y prism has low dn/dT (3 X 10 -6) minimizing temperature shifts

8. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph PARAS will be enclosed in a vacuum vessel and operated at 10-2 mbar for instrument stability. Fully double scrambled fibers for high RV accuracy Acknowledge very useful discussons/input from F. Pepe, S. Udry Geneva Obs.

9. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph The main Optics are expected to arrive from SESO (France) in late Nov 09. Vacuum Chamber Inside view Prism

10. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph Prism 31.6g/mm R4 echelle grating in its storage cell Camera systems from IR labs with a vibration damping system to reduce cryotiger vibration amplitude to 10nm

11. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph Dedicated Insulated Room has been constructed in the Mt Abu observatory to house the PARAS instrument Insulation and active temperature control of room will maintain the instrument temperature at 0.01 deg C around the set point of 25C Prism

12. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph Include Telescope F/13 to Fiber F/4 transfer optics Telescope Focus & Pinhole position 50micronFiber Tip Jacketed Fiber tip F/4 Doublet F/13 Doublet Jacketed Fiber tip Custom made fiber assembly by Polymicro has both fibers in the same epoxy with a 180um space between them. Monolithic assembly minimized drifts between the star and calib fibers. F/4 Doublet

13. Dedicated 50cm Photometric Telescope Include • Dedicated 50 cm Photometric telescope will be available at the Mt Abu site by December 2009 • Equipped with a 4k x 4k front illuminated CCD (QE=60% in V) • FOV is 37 x 37 arcmin • Will be useful for photometric monitoring of PARAS candidates, known transits, and wide field searches PRL Exoplanet Programs are Supported by the Govt. of India, Department of Space, and the PRL director (J.N. Goswami)

14. PARAS + Dedicated 50cm Photometric Telescope Include Refining Ephemerids with RV and then searching transit windows to find long period TRANSITING planets around BRIGHT stars with KNOWN RV planets – see TERMS poster by Stephen Kane

15. Science with ongoing Programs Include Complementary photometric capability along with PARAS enables scientific programs like the search for transits around long period exoplanets by refining their transit windows with RV and then observing with the 50cm telescope , and with PARAS to detect the transit with photometry and Rossiter McLaughlin. Also a good suite to confirm candidate exoplanets around giant stars detected with ongoing surveys like that at the HET. PARAS red wavelengths useful to test concepts of radial velocity extraction in presence of telluric features. Essential test for future NIR spectrographs. Possible follow-up and confirmation of candidates from ongoing multi-object RV surveys like SDSSIII MARVELS Long term monitoring of bright stars to discover low mass exoplanets. Stellar astrophysics studies will also be enabled.

16. Future Plans • PARAS has been built to be very efficient and can be coupled to a future 2.5-3.5m telescope with very little additional slit losses • Goal is to have a dedicated 2.5m robotic telescope for PARAS and for RV searches by 2015. Long term monitoring of bright stars ar high RV precision, followup and confirmation of long period candidates • Longer term ideas for possible space missions in very preliminary discussion stage