1. India’s Perspective on Exoplanet Research
Suvrath Mahadevan
on behalf of
Abhijit Chakraborty,
Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Department of Space, India

2. India’s Perspective
India is a relative newcomer to modern exoplanet research
On going strategy
Near Term (within next 1yr)
Highly stable fiber fed spectrograph, PARAS, being commissioned at the Mt Abu 1.2m telescope in Jan 2010
Long Term (next 5-10 years) possibilities
Dedicated m robotic telescope with PARAS for precision RV followup
Possibilities of Space Missions in very preliminary discussion stage

3. ChandraYaan-1 Spacecraft, India’s Moon Mission
Polar Satellites Launch Vehicle (PSLV). Payload consists of instuments built by ISRO, ESA, NASA, and some other organizations.
ChandraYaan-1 Spacecraft, India’s Moon Mission

4. PRL Advanced Radial Velocity All Sky Search
PARAS
PRL Advanced Radial Velocity All Sky Search
Fiber-Fed Spectrograph
Built to be very stable
Fiber fed
Temperature stabilized, and in a vacuum enclosure
Star and Th-Ar on different fibers, so simultaneous calibration of Instrument Drift
Th-Ar
Star
PARAS, India’s First high efficiency stable echelle spectrograph will be coupled to the Mt Abu 1.2 telescope
PARAS Team includes Abhijit Chakraborty (PI), F.M Pathan, Venkatramani, S Mahadevan (PSU), Harvey Richardson (UBC), Arpita Rao, SAC & PRL Engineers

5. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph
80 nights per year guaranteed to planet search program with PARAS
Median site seeing is 1arcsec. PARAS fiber on sky is 2.35 arcsec- so VERY efficient instrument.
150n/yr photometric, ~250 clear night
PARAS coupled to the Mt Abu 1.2 m telescope
Instrument Commissioning on site Jan 2010

6. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph
PARAS is a R=70k resolution Echelle spectrograph
Comissioning Jan 2010
Mt Abu 1.2 Telescope in India
nm simultaneous coverage
Th-Ar Calibration
Fiber Fed
White Pupil Design
Prism Cross-Diperser
100 mm Beam
R4 Grating
Chakraborty, Richardson & Mahadevan, SPIE 2008

7. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph
370 nm
850nm
Wide Simultaneous Wavelength Coverage with a 4k x 4k deep depletion e2v CCD. CaII HK-Ca NIR Triplet coverage in one shot.
PBM8Y prism has low dn/dT (3 X 10 -6) minimizing temperature shifts

8. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph
PARAS will be enclosed in a vacuum vessel and operated at 10-2 mbar for instrument stability.
Fully double scrambled fibers for high RV accuracy
Acknowledge very useful discussons/input from F. Pepe, S. Udry Geneva Obs.

9. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph
The main Optics are expected to arrive from SESO (France) in late Nov 09.
Vacuum Chamber
Inside view
Prism

10. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph
Prism
31.6g/mm R4 echelle grating in its storage cell
Camera systems from IR labs with a vibration damping system to reduce cryotiger vibration amplitude to 10nm

11. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph
Dedicated Insulated Room has been constructed in the Mt Abu observatory to house the PARAS instrument
Insulation and active temperature control of room will maintain the instrument temperature at 0.01 deg C around the set point of 25C
Prism

12. PARAS: A stable Fiber Fed Echelle Spectrograph
Include
Telescope F/13 to Fiber F/4 transfer optics
Telescope Focus
& Pinhole position
50micron Fiber Tip
Jacketed Fiber tip
F/4 Doublet
F/13 Doublet
Jacketed Fiber tip
Custom made fiber assembly by Polymicro has both fibers in the same epoxy with a 180um space between them. Monolithic assembly minimized drifts between the star and calib fibers.
F/4 Doublet

13. Dedicated 50cm Photometric Telescope
Include
Dedicated 50 cm Photometric telescope will be available at the Mt Abu site by December 2009
Equipped with a 4k x 4k front illuminated CCD (QE=60% in V)
FOV is 37 x 37 arcmin
Will be useful for photometric monitoring of PARAS candidates, known transits, and wide field searches
PRL Exoplanet Programs are Supported by the Govt. of India, Department of Space, and the PRL director (J.N. Goswami)

14. PARAS + Dedicated 50cm Photometric Telescope
Include
Refining Ephemerids with RV and then searching transit windows to find long period TRANSITING planets around BRIGHT stars with KNOWN RV planets – see TERMS poster by Stephen Kane

15. Science with ongoing Programs
Include
Complementary photometric capability along with PARAS enables scientific programs like the search for transits around long period exoplanets by refining their transit windows with RV and then observing with the 50cm telescope , and with PARAS to detect the transit with photometry and Rossiter McLaughlin.
Also a good suite to confirm candidate exoplanets around giant stars detected with ongoing surveys like that at the HET.
PARAS red wavelengths useful to test concepts of radial velocity extraction in presence of telluric features. Essential test for future NIR spectrographs.
Possible follow-up and confirmation of candidates from ongoing multi-object RV surveys like SDSSIII MARVELS
Long term monitoring of bright stars to discover low mass exoplanets.
Stellar astrophysics studies will also be enabled.

16. Future Plans
PARAS has been built to be very efficient and can be coupled to a future m telescope with very little additional slit losses
Goal is to have a dedicated 2.5m robotic telescope for PARAS and for RV searches by Long term monitoring of bright stars ar high RV precision, followup and confirmation of long period candidates
Longer term ideas for possible space missions in very preliminary discussion stage