* Astronomy

Title: The Habitable-Zone Planet Finder: A Stabilised Fibre-Fed NIR Spectrograph for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope
Authors: Suvrath Mahadevan, Lawrence Ramsey, Chad Bender, Ryan Terrien, Jason T. Wright, Sam Halverson, Fred Hearty, Matt Nelson, Adam Burton, Stephen Redman, Steven Osterman, Scott Diddams, James Kasting, Michael Endl, Rohit Deshpande

We present the scientific motivation and conceptual design for the recently funded Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), a stabilised fibre-fed near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph for the 10 meter class Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) that will be capable of discovering low mass planets around M dwarfs. The HPF will cover the NIR Y & J bands to enable precise radial velocities to be obtained on mid M dwarfs, and enable the detection of low mass planets around these stars. The conceptual design is comprised of a cryostat cooled to 200K, a dual fibre-feed with a science and calibration fibre, a gold coated mosaic echelle grating, and a Teledyne Hawaii-2RG (H2RG) NIR detector with a 1.7µm cutoff. A uranium-neon hollow-cathode lamp is the baseline wavelength calibration source, and we are actively testing laser frequency combs to enable even higher radial velocity precision. We will present the overall instrument system design and integration with the HET, and discuss major system challenges, key choices, and ongoing research and development projects to mitigate risk. We also discuss the ongoing process of target selection for the HPF survey.

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