The Northrop Grumman External Occulter Testbed: Preliminary Results

Details The Northrop Grumman External Occulter Testbed: Preliminary Results The Northrop Grumman External Occulter Testbed: Preliminary Results

May 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...210.3306l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 210, #33.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.146

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We have built a subscale testbed to demonstrate and validate the performance of the New Worlds Observer (NWO), a terrestrial planet finder external-occulter mission concept. The external occulter concept allows observations of nearby exo-Earths using two spacecraft: one carrying an occulter that is tens of meters in diameter and the other carrying a generic space telescope. The occulter is completely opaque, resembling a flower, with petals having a hypergaussian profile that enable 10-10 intensity suppression of stars that potentially harbor terrestrial planets.
The baseline flight NWO system has a 30 meter occulter flying 30,000 km in front of a 4 meter class telescope. Testing the flight configuration on the ground is not feasible, so we have matched the Fresnel number of the flight configuration ( 10) using a subscale occulter. Our testbed consists of an 80 meter length evacuated tube, with a high precision occulter in the center of the tube. The occulter is 4 cm in diameter, manufactured with ¼ micron metrological accuracy and less than 2 micron tip truncation. This mimics a 30 meter occulter with millimeter figure accuracy and less than centimeter tip truncation. Our testbed is an evolving experiment, and we report here the first, preliminary, results using a single wavelength laser (532 nm) as the source.

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