SUPERBLINK / MDM-RED project info

[Adam Dray]

Anyone got information on Dr. Sebastien Lepine and his SUPERBLINK near-star mapping project?

He's mapping all stars, including all the red dwarf stars, within 100 parsecs (and within 25 parsecs).

From the linked page:

Mapping Stars Within 100 Parsecs Of The Sun

My primary mission is to chart the nearby stars and create the most accurate 3D map of stars in the vicinity of the Sun. A complementary goal is to identify special groups of stars within that volume, including rare stars like white dwarfs, and stars which may have exoplanets. Several strategies are used to find those stars, which are hiding in images that astronomers have collected over the years. Nearby stars can be hiding "in plain sight" because it is generally not possible to measure the distances to stars from images alone, and most stars on the sky are very far away. Of the 2-3 billion stars that astronomers can detect in their images, only 300,000 are within 100 parsecs (325 light-years) of the Sun. The trick is to search for "needles in the haystack", and find which of the billions of stars are close neighbors to the Sun. The SUPERBLINK survey was developed under a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

I couldn't find a lot on the project.

I like this bit:

The MDM-RED spectroscopic survey

The closer the stars, the better. Out of the 300,000 stars we have found lurking within 100 parsecs of the Sun, the most important ones are the stars in the so-called "Solar Neighborhood", or stars located within just 25 parsecs of the Sun (about 80 light-years). The stars in the Solar Neighborhood are our blood test of what kinds of stars exist in our Galaxy. Those stars are closer, so they are just easier to find. When we have them ALL, then we can calculate how many stars there are in our Galaxy per unit of space, and then estimate how many stars total there are in our Galaxy. A complete census of the nearby stars is also like a blood test of the Galaxy, telling us which types of stars exist in the Universe and what their relative numbers are. It turns out that stars like our Sun (also known as "G" stars) are relatively uncommon, while stars smaller and cooler than the Sun (also known as "red dwarfs" or "M" stars, like the star Proxima Centauri) are very abundant. We have now assembled a list which we believe contains close to 98% of all stars in the Solar Neighborhood. To figure out exactly what type of star each is, we are collecting SPECTROGRAMS of all those stars at the MDM observatory in Kitt Peak Arizona. Spectrograms have arleady been collected for about 6,000 stars, and analysis is under way. We find cool stars ("red dwarfs") to be very common indeed, as they compose over 85% of the stars in the Solar Neighborhood.

Over 6,000 stars (85% of which are red dwarfs) within 80 LY.