2019-09-23

categorizing noise sources; setting goals

Today at the Terra Hunting Experiment Science Team meeting (in the beautiful offices of the Royal Astronomical Society in London) we discussed science-driven aspects of the project. There was way too much to report here, but I learned a huge amount in presentations by Annelies Mortier (Cambridge) and by Samantha Thompson (Cambridge) about the sources of astrophysical variability in stars that is (effectively) noise in the RV signals. In particular, they have developed aspects of a taxonomy of noise sources that could be used to organize our thinking about what's important to work on and what approaches to take. I got excited about working on mitigating these, which my loyal reader knows is the subject of my most recent NASA proposal.

Late in the day, I made my presentation about possible high-level goals for the survey and how we might flow decisions down from those goals. There was a very lively discussion of these. What surprised me (given the diversity of possible goals, from “find an Earth twin” to “determine the occurrence rate for rocky planets at one-year periods”) was that there was a kind of consensus: One part of the consensus was along the lines of maximizing our sensitivity where no other survey has ever been sensitive. Another part of the consensus was along the lines of being able to perform statistical analyses of our output.

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