Paper 13098-85
Paper 13098-85
Good data in good and bad times: operations of the CARMENES radial-velocity survey at Calar Alto
19 June 2024 • 17:30 - 19:00 Japan Standard Time | Room G5, North - 1F
Abstract
CARMENES is an instrument designed to search for extrasolar planets around M dwarfs with the radial-velocity technique. It consists of two independent high-resolution echelle spectrographs for the visible and near-infrared wavelength ranges, which are simultaneously fed through fibers from a front end at the Cassegrain focus of the 3.5m telescope at Calar Alto, Spain. CARMENES was installed in late 2015 and has been operated almost continuously since Jan 1st, 2016, with only a brief interruption due to the Covid pandemic. The first five years were mostly dedicated to a large survey carried out by the CARMENES consortium. Currently the instrument supports two “legacy” programs and a number of smaller projects. On-site operations are performed by the observatory staff, while the instrument team still provides services such as automated scheduling, monitoring of instrument health and data quality, and pipeline processing of all data. Joint efforts have been necessary to implement measures to improve the performance, and to address occasional problems and failures.
Presenter
Landessternwarte Heidelberg (Germany)
Andreas Quirrenbach obtained a PhD from Bonn University in 1990, with thesis work on compact radio sources conducted at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy. After holding postdoctoral appointments at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching (Germany), he became Professor of Physics at the University of California in San Diego in 1997. He moved to Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2002, and to Heidelberg University in 2006, where he is now Professor of Astronomy and Director of the State Observatory. His main research interests are astronomical instrumentation and the study of extrasolar planetary systems. As Principal Investigator, Andreas Quirrenbach led the construction of the German-Spanish CARMENES instrument and the subsequent survey that has discovered more than 50 planets orbiting cool low-mass stars in the “Solar neighborhood”.