Abstract

Just five years ago the prospect of finding temperate, rocky worlds around other stars was still the subject of science fiction: none had been found and reasonable estimates put us decades away from such a momentous discovery. All of that has changed very recently on the heels of the extraordinarily successful NASA Kepler mission, which has shown that rocky, potentially habitable planets are common throughout the Galaxy, and that the nearest inhabited planet is likely in the Solar Neighborhood. This search will require new, dedicated facilities capable of detecting the tiny signals of rocky planets around bright stars. To this end, I will describe the MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA), a robotic, multi-telescope facility dedicated to searching for habitable worlds and understanding the nearest planetary systems.