The Automated Planet Finder Telescope (APF) is a fully automated 2.4-meter optical telescope under construction at Lick Observatory designed to search for extrasolar planets in the range of five to twenty times the mass of the Earth. The instrument will examine 25 stars per night. Over a decade, the telescope will study 1,000 nearby stars for planets.[1] It has an estimated cost of $10 million.[2]
The telescope will use high-precision radial velocity measurements to measure the gravitational reflex motion of nearby stars caused by the orbiting of planets. It is capable of detecting stellar motions as small as one meter per second, comparable to a slow walking speed. The main targets will be stars within about 100 light years of the Earth.
First light was originally scheduled for 2006, but delays in the construction of the major components of the telescope pushed this back to mid-2009.[3] Now it is scheduled for the first months of 2011.
The spectrometer will be very sensitive and is optimized for speed and radial velocity precision, will detect the very small changes in each star’s velocity, down to 1 meter per second (1.0 m/s).[4] With the same radial velocity precision as HARPS and HIRES.