NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have established the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) partnership to support community exoplanet research. The NN-EXPLORE program was created in response to the community need for observational resources for exoplanet discovery and characterization. Through the NN-EXPLORE partnership, time is made available for exoplanet confirmation and characterization, in particular for TESS planetary candidates. There are multiple resources available to the community through this partnership; more information on how to apply for time through the NN-EXPLORE Program can be found in the NOIRLab Call for Proposals.
The cornerstone of the NN-EXPLORE Program is the NASA partnership with the WIYN Telescope, located at Kitt Peak Observatory. The premiere instrument on the telescope is NEID, which is a high-resolution spectrometer capable of radial velocity precisions of 30 cm/s. The NEID Data Archive is operated by NExScI. Also available on WIYN is the high-spatial-resolution optical speckle imager NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Stellar Speckle Imager (NESSI). Other instruments available to the community include Hydra, ODI, and WHIRC.
The NN-EXPLORE program supports three main projects through NExScI:
(last updated April 20th, 2026 14:32:03)
The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program.
