Ground Based Observatory Instrument will try and find Exoplanets.

ESPRESSO Planet Hunter Ready to Drink in the Universe for Alien Worlds

A powerful new planet hunter has begun searching the heavens for rocky, potentially habitable worlds. The ESPRESSO instrument, which is installed on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile, made its first observations last month, project team members announced today (Dec. 6).

 Me, "Another instance where a technological instrument is going to try and find exoplanets from a Ground observatory."

From article, (A powerful new planet hunter has begun searching the heavens for rocky, potentially habitable worlds.

The ESPRESSO instrument, which is installed on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile, made its first observations last month, project team members announced today (Dec. 6).

ESPRESSO is designed to find alien planets via the "radial velocity" method — that is, by detecting the tiny wobbles in a star's movement caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. The instrument is the next-generation version of the prolific HARPS spectrograph, which has discovered more than 100 exoplanets to date. [7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets]

"ESPRESSO isn't just the evolution of our previous instruments like HARPS, but it will be transformational, with its higher resolution and higher precision," project lead scientist Francesco Pepe, of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, said in a statement.

Just how precise will ESPRESSO (whose name is short for Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) actually be? Project team members are aiming for a velocity-measurement precision of just a few centimeters (1 inch or so) per second, compared with the 1 meter (3.3. feet) per second capability of HARPS. ESPRESSO should therefore be able to spot some of the smallest planets ever found, ESO representatives said.

Part of the improvement is due to technology advances, and part owes to ESPRESSO's placement on a much larger telescope, team members said.)

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