An exciting update on the Origins grant funded award project Tierras within the Charbonneau Group: 

The construction of a new camera for The Tierras Observatory is well underway at Cambridge Discovery Park, the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) | Harvard & Smithsonian laboratory located near the Alewife T Stop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tierras will be an ultra-precise facility dedicated to discovering terrestrial planets around nearby small stars (which astronomers dub “M-dwarfs”), as well as moons and rings of planets outside the Solar System. Our camera will triple the field of view of the telescope, allowing us to observe more stars, and employ a custom filter to desensitize our observations from atmospheric effects known to limit ground-based observations of M-dwarfs. We are currently assembling the optics that make up the Tierras camera in the lab, as can be seen in the time-lapse below. The Tierras project is led by Juliana García-Mejía, a fourth year graduate student at the CfA. She is advised by David Charbonneau, who is a professor in the Harvard Astronomy Department. Tierras will begin science operations in early 2021. 

Caption for time-lapse: Juliana García-Mejía and engineers Joseph Zajac & Robert Fata can be seen inside the clean room inspecting one of the four Tierras lenses, and consequently installing it inside an aluminum bezel.