The Terra Hunting Experiment (THE) is a project to discover Earth-mass planets in Earth-like orbits around sun-like stars.
It involves the construction, calibration and operation of a new state-of-the-art, echelle-type spectrograph that can determine velocities of stars (Doppler shifts) at precisions measured in centimeters per second. The project will take 10 years to conduct an intensive search for planets around a substantial set of target stars. The interests of CCA, which joined the project in 2018, include development of new techniques for extracting exceedingly precise radial-velocity measurements from spectroscopic data, creation and deployment of long-term observing strategies to optimize planet-discovery yield, and estimation of exoplanet population statistics to constrain planetary-system formation models.
