News post, 07 December 2015
As you may have seen from the recent STFC email via the UK Astrocommunity mailing list, our project: HARPS3 and the Terra Hunting Experiment at the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), is undergoing STFC review for a PPRP award. As part of this review process we have been asked to provide evidence of the UK support for HARPS3 to help understand the wider perspective of who else in the UK astro community would be interested in using HARPS3 and the list of science cases other than our own.
If you would be interested to use a high resolution/stability echelle spectrograph installed on a roboticized telescope (further description on our project website: www.terrahunting.org) we would be grateful if you could express your interest by completing our short survey. The closing date for replies is Friday 8th January. We appreciate your time in helping us satisfy the STFC's request for understanding the potential UK userbase of our instrument.
In summary, HARPS3 on the INT will offer a substantial number of nights (~1000) of community access over the course of the 10 year Terra Hunting Experiment. The new mode of robotic operation enabled on an upgraded INT will offer opportunity for high resolution spectrographic studies that are time sensitive or time-series measurements which require a specific sampling rate and any other programme that would benefit from a flexible or non-traditional allocation of observing time.