A Medium Size Mission for Finding and Characterizing Terrestrial ExoPlanets with an External Occulter and a Conventional Space Telescope

Details A Medium Size Mission for Finding and Characterizing Terrestrial ExoPlanets with an External Occulter and a Conventional Space Telescope A Medium Size Mission for Finding and Characterizing Terrestrial ExoPlanets with an External Occulter and a Conventional Space Telescope

Jan 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21542105k&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #421.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.287

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Scientific paper

In this poster we present a medium size mission concept for finding and characterizing Earthlike exoplanets in the habitable zone of nearby stars using an external occulter and a conventional telescope with a 1 to 1.5 m primary mirror, thus satisfying the primary goal of the exoplanet program within the next decade. While there have been many recent studies of large scale missions for exoplanet discovery and characterization, few have been done at the intermediate scale with the capability of detecting and characterizing Earthlike planets. Here, we present an optimized occulter, less than 40 meters in diameter and flying less than 50,000 km from the telescope, with accompanying spacecraft and propulsion system using currently available components. We combine the occulter with a conventional telescope based on existing capability. We show that the system has a robust science program, based on automated mission modeling, that includes detection of Earth-size planets in their habitable zone about anywhere from 3 to 15 nearby stars, for etaearth between 0.3 and 1, with a full spectra from UV to NIR for a significant fraction. This is rounded out by many more detections and characterizations of Super-Earths, gas and ice giant planets, dust disks, and brown dwarfs. We show that the cost is within the range of a probe class mission and that the science compares well to other concepts for terrestrial planet detection at this scale.

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