Ongoing search for Habitable Exo-planets: Building Instruments

Search for Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone (exo-earths) has been the holy grail in exo-planet astronomy research. In order to detect these planets, we have to detect a signal which shifts the spectrum of the star by a few silicon atoms on the detector (~10 cm/sec)! The extreme precision radial velocity (EPRV) community has made incredible progress in building ultra-stable spectrographs for bringing down the measurable radial velocity (RV) precision to sub-m/sec. In this talk, after a brief introduction to the radial velocity measurement technique, I shall present how we built two state-of-the-art ultra-stable spectrographs, one in infrared and another in optical. The infrared one is the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF). It is actively observing almost every night on the 10-m Hobby Eberly Telescope, McDonald Observatory, USA. HPF is currently the most stable near-infrared spectrograph published in the literature. The second optical spectrograph is NEID. NEID was the winning proposal of NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) partnership's call for an Extreme Precision Doppler Spectrometer based on recommendations of the Astro2010 Decadal Survey. NEID aims to achieve RV precision  < 29 cm/s. We are currently commissioning NEID on the 3.5-m WIYN telescope, Kitt Peak, USA. This instrument will be available to the entire astronomical community via competitive proposals.