NEID (NUH-eed or NOO-id, rhymes with “fluid”), which gets its name from the Tohono O'odham word meaning "to see", is funded by the joint NASA/NSF Exoplanet Exploration Program (or NN-EXPLORE).

NEID consists of two principal parts. The port adaptor (provided by the University of Wisconsin) is mounted on the Bent Cassegrain port at WIYN. It is used to acquire and guide on a target star, precisely maintaining the stellar centroid on a science fiber in the focal plane. Other nearby fibers gather simultaneous light from the sky. Calibration light can also be sent to NEID via the port adaptor. The fibers feed their light to a new spectrograph room built by WIYN on the ground floor of the observatory. The room ensures a stable environment for the spectrograph. The NEID spectrograph is built by Penn State University (Suvrath Mahadevan, PI). It is sealed in a vacuum chamber to maintain the optics at a stable temperature (variations <1 mK) and isolated from outside disturbances over NEID's 5-year program baseline.

NEID Characteristics

Data Products

All data taken with NEID will be processed through the NEID data reduction pipeline run daily at NExScI (https://neid.ipac.caltech.edu/search.php). The following data products will be available via the NEID archive at NExScI:

• Raw 2D echellogram
• Representative guider camera image
• Representative coherent fiber bundle flux data stream
• Extracted, 1D wavelength calibrated spectra and uncertainties for the science, sky, and calibration fiber
• Representative telluric absorption model
• Representative sky emission model
• Cross-correlation functions by order and barycentric corrected RVs
• Parameterized activity indicators

The metadata (source, observation time, exposure time, release date) for all observations will be available as soon as the data are ingested in the NEID archive. The data products will be available after a proprietary period, the GO proprietary period is 18 months.

NEID obtains a standard calibration sequence every night and morning, which includes bias, flats, wavelength calibrators. Spectrophotometric and telluric standards will not be taken as standard products; proposers should request these (and account for them in their time request) if they are desired.

NEID also observes a small set of RV standard stars every night, and the raw and reduced data products will be available to the community with zero proprietary period. The standard star list includes 9 targets, of which 1-3 will be observed every night NEID operates.

NEID also takes ~300 spectra of the Sun every clear day using a dedicated solar feed (funded by the Heising Seimens Foundation). These data are processed through the NEID data reduction pipeline at NExScI and available to the public with no proprietary period. See Lin et al. 2022 for details on the solar feed and its early performance.

NEID Splinter Session at the January 2019 AAS

A lot of useful information about NEID was presented at the NNEXPLORE NEID splinter session, held at the recent AAS meeting in Seattle. Suvrath Mahadevan, NEID PI at PSU presented an overview and current status; Jason Wright, Project Scientist at PSU focused on the exciting science NEID can deliver. Jayadev Rajagopal, WIYN Scientist, summarized the Operations plan (including the queue); Rachel Akeson from NEXScI presented the data archive and pipeline capabilities, John Callas, Project Manager at NASA/JPL finished up with a policy overview.

Slides from that session can be found here.

Last modified: 27-Sep-2023 11:50:05 MST