Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2021

35 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING T he NEID instrument, mounted on the 3.5 meter WIYN telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. This state-of-the-art spectrometer has officially started its scientific mission of discovering new exoplanets. [NSF’s National Op- tical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/KPNO/NSF/AURA] particularly favorable conditions of stability of both the instruments and the light sources. For the continuous search for Earth- sized planets (discoveries and ver- ifications), something even more precise is therefore needed, such as NEID, a new spectrograph installed on the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. NEID is a very unguessable acronym that stands for “NN-EXPLORE Exo- planet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy”, where NN-EXPLORE stands for the “NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research Program.” Conceived as part of a partnership between NASA and the National Science Foundation, the NEID proj- ect began to take shape in 2016, when researchers at Penn State Uni- versity were awarded a $10 million