ESPRESSO: The Decisive Spectrograph to Find Earth 2.0

[alberto91]

I would like to talk about an instrument that has been sometimes overlooked: ESPRESSO.

As most of you probably know, ESPRESSO is the only current spectrograph able to detect Earth-sized planets.

I think it will be a key instrument for 2 reasons:

1- The majority of the most potentially habitable exoplanets were discovered with the radial velocity method.

2- Only 0.5 % of the Earth-like planets in the Milky Way could be detectable by using transit photometry.

Do you think we will find a nearby Earth 2.0 with ESPRESSO in 2020?

[robin_astro]

Checking in the extrasolar planets encyclopedia

http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/

I see there are currently 23 exoplanets with known mass less than 1.5 earth.  Almost all were discovered using the transit method. How were the masses of these planets determined?

Using ESPRESSO as a survey instrument sounds very inefficient compared with transit surveys. Is there a science program planned using ESPRESSO as a survey instrument or is its main task following up known transiting exoplanets ?

Wikipedia suggests that ESPRESSO is currently not doing much better than HARPS 30cm/s precision. Do you have any inside information on the latest status ?

Cheers

Robin

[Davey-T]

There are a few exoplanet detectors in the pipeline as it's now flavour of the month  with those that control the budgets.

Dave