Nate McCrady (U Montana) - Project Minerva: Detection of rocky habitable zone planets via high cadence observations

Small rocky planets induce radial velocity signals that are difficult to detect in the presence of stellar noise sources. Project Minerva is a robotic observatory dedicated to detection of rocky planets in the habitable zone around nearby stars. The observatory will consist of four 0.7-m telescopes at Mt. Hopkins that will use fiber optic cables to simultaneously feed a stable spectrograph to perform an intense campaign of precise velocimetry on the brightest, nearest, Sun-like stars. Our strategy is to overcome astrophysical stellar noise though high cadence observations, and to overcome instrumental noise limitations by combining temperature and pressure stability with an iodine calibration cell. I will present simulated Minerva observations to estimate the planet detection yield and habitable zone planet detections expected from a three year observing campaign.