Our five-person (Bedell, Hogg, Queloz, Winn, Zhao) exoplanet meeting continued today, with Winn (Princeton) working out the elements needed to produce a simulator for a long-term EPRV monitoring program with simple observing rules. He is interested in working out under what circumstances such a program can be informative about exoplanets in regimes that neither Kepler nor existing EPRV programs have strongly constrained, like near-Earth-masses on near-Earth-orbits around near-Sun stars. And indeed we must choose a metric or metrics for success. His list of what's needed, software-wise, is non-trivial, but we worked out that every part of it would be a publishable contribution to the literature, so it could be a great set of projects. And a very useful set of tools.
Zhao (Yale) showed me two-dimensional calibration data from the EXPRES instrument illuminated by their laser-frequency comb. It is astounding. The images are beautiful, and every single line in each image is at a perfectly known (from physics!) absolute wavelength. This might be the beginning of a very new world. The instrument is also beautifully designed so that all the slit (fiber, really, but it is a rectangular fiber) images are almost perfectly aligned with one of the CCD directions, even in all four corners of the image. Not like the spectrographs I'm used to!
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