Francesco Pepe
Title: Dr. sc.
nat. Function: MER
Born 1968 in Olten,
Switzerland Observatoire
de Genève 51,
ch. des Maillettes CH-1290
Versoix GE Switzerland Tel.: 0041 (0)22 379 23 96 Fax.: 0041 (0)22 379 22 05 |
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Search for low-mass exoplanets in the southern sky. HARPS on the 3.6-m ESO
telescope at La Silla, Chile |
Follow-up of KEPLER-satellite Earth-like
exoplanet candidates by radial velocity. Copy of
HARPS on the WHT at La Palma, Canary Islands |
Astrometric survey of extra-solar planets with VLTI-PRIMA.
Construction of the Differential Delay Lines and Astrometric
SW for PRIMA@VLTI in Paranal, Chile |
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I have started my career as
physicist in 1992 at the Swiss Federal Institute of the Technology where, in
the frame of a PhD thesis, I designed and developed a far-infrared
balloon-borne spectrometer. I arrived at the Geneva Observatory in April 1998
in order to pursue research in this field. Shortly after my arrival I have
been assigned to the HARPS project of which I have been the Project Manager
and System Engineer. HARPS has been installed and commissioned successfully
on October 2003, and delivers since then a bunch of exciting results. After
that I dedicated myself to another interesting project: the “Astrometric survey of extra-solar planets with
VLTI-PRIMA”. We will deliver to ESO differential delay lines and an astrometric SW package in exchange for observing time on
the VLTI-PRIMA facility. I am the Project Manager of this challenging project
and member of its Science Team. Finally, I am starting now an extremely
interesting collaboration with our friend at the Harvard Center
for Astrophysics. We will together manufacturing a copy of HARPS to be
installed on the Wiliam Herschel Telescope on the
Canary Islands. HARPS-North, so the name of the new planet hunter, will
mostly make the follow-up of Earth-sized planet candidates discovered by the
KEPLER satellite. At the Geneva Observatory I am also responsible for the
coordination of the various projects. |
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[My links | Planet Group | Geneva
Observatory | University of Geneva | ESO]