The NEID Earth Twin Survey. III. Survey Performance after Three Years on Sky

Abstract

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

This paper contains data taken with the NEID instrument, which was funded by the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) partnership and built by Pennsylvania State University. NEID is installed on the WIYN telescope, which is operated by the NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, and the NEID archive is operated by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology. NEID is funded by NASA through JPL contract 1547612 and the NEID Data Reduction Pipeline is funded through JPL contract 1644767. NN-EXPLORE is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank the NEID Queue Observers and WIYN Observing Associates for their skillful execution of our observations. Part of this work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, sponsored by the United States Government under the Prime Contract 80NM0018D0004 between Caltech and NASA. C.I.C. acknowledges support by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by ORAU through a contract with NASA.

Computations for this research were performed on the Pennsylvania State University’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ICDS-ACI). This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. The Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center are supported by the Pennsylvania State University and the Eberly College of Science. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia, processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France, and NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services.

Based in part on observations at Kitt Peak National Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab, managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The authors are honored to be permitted to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham. We also express our deepest gratitude to Zade Arnold, Joe Davis, Michelle Edwards, John Ehret, Tina Juan, Brian Pisarek, Aaron Rowe, Fred Wortman, the Eastern Area Incident Management Team, and all of the firefighters and air support crew who fought the recent Contreras fire. Against great odds, you saved Kitt Peak National Observatory.

The Pennsylvania State University campuses are located on the original homelands of the Erie, Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora), Lenape (Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe, Stockbridge-Munsee), Shawnee (Absentee, Eastern, and Oklahoma), Susquehannock, and Wahzhazhe (Osage) Nations. As a land grant institution, we acknowledge and honor the traditional caretakers of these lands and strive to understand and model their responsible stewardship. We also acknowledge the longer history of these lands and our place in that history.

Facilities

WIYN - Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO Telescope (NEID).

Software References

astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), (S. Kanodia & J. Wright 2018), matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), numpy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), RadVel (B. J. Fulton et al. 2018), RVSearch (L. J. Rosenthal et al. 2021), scipy (T. E. Oliphant 2007).