goals: achieved

I achieved my goals for Terra Hunting Experiment this week! After my work on the plane and the discussion we had yesterday, we (as a group) were able to draft a set of potentially sensible and valuable high-level goals for the survey. These are, roughly, maximizing the number of stars around which we have sensitivity to Earth-like planets, delivering statistically sound occurrence rate estimates, and delivering scientifically valuable products to the community. In that order! More about this soon. But I'm very pleased.

Another theme of the last two days is that most or maybe all EPRV experiments do many things slightly wrong. Like how they do their optimal extraction. Or how they propagate their simultaneous reference to the science data. Or how they correct the tellurics. None of these is a big mistake; they are all small mistakes. But precision requirements are high! Do these small mistakes add up to anything wrong or problematic at the end of the day? Unfortunately, it is expensive to find out.

Related: I discovered today that the fundamental paper on optimal extraction contains some conceptual mistakes. Stretch goal: Write a publishable correction on the plane home!