Image: The Eagle Nebula (M16) in false colour taken with MINERVA T1 (Daniel Johns).
The MINERVA-Australis telescope array is located at UniSQ’s Mount Kent Observatory, a thirty minute drive outside of Toowoomba. It is a key facility in supporting NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is using transit photometry to detect Earth-like planets near our Solar system.
MINERVA-Australis was built in 2018 and funded by the Australian Research Council via a LIEF grant and from contributions from multiple collaborating institutions, namely the , Nanjing University, , , , , and the .
MINERVA-Australis consists of an array of Planewave CDK700 0.7m telescopes connected by optical fibre to a stabilised, R = 75,000 echelle spectrograph, covering the wavelengths 480–630 nm, designed by KiwiStar Optics. Each telescope sits in its own automated clamshell Astrohaven dome, distributed in an approximate semi-circle around the main observatory building.
Due to the wavelength range of the spectrograph and the very low scattered light, the simultaneous calibration source is supplied by a Tungsten slit-flat lamp backlighting an iodine cell. This is a different approach to the typical ‘iodine cell’ method that passes the starlight through an iodine cell.
The spectrograph has 29 orders imaged on a 2k x 2k Spectral Instruments SI850 detector cooled to -90 C with 13.5 micron pixels sampling the spectrum at 3 pixels per resolution element (3 pix/fwhm).
The CDK700 telescopes are also capable of precision photometry on their Nasmyth port. There is also a photometric setup capable of Sloan griz colour photometry using a QHY600M SCMOS detector.
MINERVA-Australis has availability for US-based astronomers to pursue exoplanetary science through the . More information about applying for time through these programs is .
Image: A white light test spectrum projected onto a frosted alignment disk taken during installation (Duncan Wright).
