Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21538005c&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #380.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.590
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
A key science goal in the exoplanet community is the detection and characterization of planets with similar properties to Earth. One method of finding these Earth-size planets is by using an occulter, a spacecraft with a shaped edge flown in formation with a telescope. The size of the occulter and its location are chosen so that the occulter suppresses the light from the star by ten orders of magnitude or more over a particular wavelength band, while leaving the planet light unaffected. Most designs have the occulter tens of meters in diameter, and separated from the telescope by tens of thousands of kilometers, which gives the occulter an angular size on the order of a hundred milliarcseconds.
Occulters have a set of petals, identical symmetric structures arrayed around the rim of a central disk which block all the light that hits them. The occulter can be treated as binary apodizer, which allows all or none of the light past at a point, and the petals are used to make the binary apodization approximate a smooth apodization that defines the diffraction pattern from the occulter. The number of petals is chosen so that light scattered by the discontinuities in the binary apodization is negligible across the aperture of the telescope.
In this talk, I discuss methods of designing occulters, of estimating their tolerances to manufacturing and dynamic errors, and some of the modifications that can be made to them while maintaining their properties of high light suppression. I will also discuss one particular realization of an occulter system in THEIA, a 4m UV/visible/IR telescope which would be matched with an occulter to find Earth-like planets.
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