First light results from PARAS: the PRL Echelle Spectrograph
2010
We present the first light commissioning results from the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) optical fiber-fed high
resolution cross-dispersed Echelle Spectrograph. It is capable of a single- shot spectral coverage of 3700A to 8600A at R
~ 63,000 and is under very stable conditions of temperature (0.04°C at 23°C). In the very near future pressure control
will also be achieved by enclosing the entire spectrograph in a low-pressure vacuum chamber (~0.01mbar). It is attached
to a 1.2m telescope using two 50micron core optical fibers (one for the star and another for simultaneous Th-Ar spectral
calibration). The 1.2m telescope is located at Mt. Abu, India, and we are guaranteed about 80 to 100 nights a year for
observations with the spectrograph. The instrument will be ultimately used for radial-velocity searches of exoplanets
around 1000 dwarf stars, brighter than 10th magnitude, for the next 5 years with a precision of 3 to 5m/s using the
simultaneous Th-Ar spectral lamp reference technique. The spectrograph has already achieved a stability of 3.7m/s in
short-term time scale and in the near future we expect the stability to be at 1m/s once we install the spectrograph inside
the vacuum chamber.
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