Demonstrating Starshade Performance as Part of NASA's Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions

Details Demonstrating Starshade Performance as Part of NASA's Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions Demonstrating Starshade Performance as Part of NASA's Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21915507k&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #155.07

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

In this poster we describe the results of our project to design, manufacture, and measure a prototype starshade petal as part of the Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions program. An external occult is a satellite employing a large screen, or starshade,that flies in formation with a spaceborne telescope to provide the starlight suppression needed for detecting and characterizing exoplanets. Among the advantages of using an occulter are the broadband allowed for characterization and the removal of light for the observatory, greatly relaxing the requirements on the telescope and instrument. In this first two-year phase we focused on the key requirement of manufacturing a precision petal with the precise tolerances needed to meet the overall error budget. These tolerances are established by modeling the effect that various mechanical and thermal errors have on scatter in the telescope image plane and by suballocating the allowable contrast degradation between these error sources. We show the results of this analysis and a representative error budget. We also present the final manufactured occulter petal and the metrology on its shape that demonstrates it meets requirements. We show that a space occulter built of petals with the same measured shape would achieve better than 1e-9 contrast. We also show our progress in building and testing sample edges with the sharp radius of curvature needed for limiting solar glint. Finally, we describe our plans for the second TDEM phase.

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