The NEID Spectrometer: Performance and Science in Year 1

NEID is a new ultra-precise radial velocity spectrometer for the 3.5m WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. It entered full science operations in 2021, and is open to the community via the NN-EXPLORE program. Over more than a year of on-sky operations, NEID has demonstrated Doppler precision well below 1 m/s for bright stars spanning the FGKM spectral classes. NEID also collects Solar RVs on every clear day, which will provide a rich legacy data set to benchmark activity mitigation techniques. I will discuss the instrument’s current performance, including on-sky measurement precision, and the operations of the queue scheduling system. I will also highlight some early science results from the first year of NEID operations. Science results to date include Solar RV science, ultra-precise Rossiter-McLaughlin obliquity measurements, and mass determination for transiting exoplanets. Finally, I will introduce the NEID Earth Twin Survey (NETS), which is surveying nearby stars for low-mass exoplanets. I will detail NEID observations of HD 26965, which has a complicated history of candidate exoplanet detections near the stellar rotation period. NEID’s precision and queue scheduling offer new insights into the challenge of disentangling exoplanets and astrophysical RV noise in the system.