Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2021

36 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING N EID Project Scientist Jason Wright at the Press Release at AAS 235, announcing the first light for NEID. [American Astronomical Society] T his video summarizes the NEID project and the expectations of astronomers who will search and study exoplanets with the new spectrograph. [NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/KPNO/NSF/AURA] contract to build the instrument. The ultimate goal was to build and operate the most accurate spectro- graph ever, as Jason Wright, associ- ate professor of astronomy and astrophysics, and NEID Project Scien- tist at Penn State, pointed out: “NEID will be more stable than any existing spectrograph, allowing as- tronomers around the world to make the precise measurements of the motions of nearby, Sun-like stars. Our team will use NEID to dis- cover and measure the orbits of rocky planets at the right distances from their stars to host liquid water on their surfaces.” NEID was installed on the WIYN tel- escope in October 2019 and the “commissioning” phase began im- mediately afterwards. This phase is a period that precedes the scientific activity of an instrument, during which a team of scientists and tech- nicians solves all the problems that may arise when moving from simu- lations to action in the field. The NEID team spent many long nights over the winter of 2019 and into 2020 to test the spectrograph. Op- erations were already well under- way when, in March 2020, every- thing was stopped due to the pan- demic, when all activities at Kitt Peak were suspended. While the WIYN telescope was turned off for eight months, the NEID team took advantage of this forced pause to make some small tweaks to the spectrograph in re- sponse to minimal prob- lems that had been identified at the begin- ning of the testing. Due to the shutdown, but above all due to the modifications and inter- ventions on the instru- ment, the commission- ing phase was restarted in November 2020, with many more nights dedicated to fine-tuning the WIYN-NEID system. Between De- cember 2020 and April 2021, several experiments were conducted to es- tablish the reliability, precision and limitations of NEID and its associ-