Observation strategy
With the Terra Hunting Experiment consortium, we will have 10 years of nightly access to the telescope. We will be able to use each night for at least 4 hours up to a total of 50% of the time across the ten year experiment. The remaining hours in the night will be for public use, decided via a standard telescope time application process, details of which will follow in due time.
The request for nightly access is motivated by the importance of dense sampling for the type of signals we are looking for in combination with modest solar-like activity. Hall et al. 2018 showed how current traditional observation schedules will likely never result in the ability to extract small long-period radial velocity signals, representing Earth-like planets around solar-type stars.
We are in the process of further investigating the effect of various dense schedules on our ability to detect signals in the data. We will post updates on this study as well as more detail regarding our observing strategy when we have them.
