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One of NASA’s primary science goals is to directly image and characterize the atmospheres of Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars. The observations are extremely challenging because the planets appear adjacent to their parent stars, near telescope diffraction limits, and their reflected light is 10 billion times fainter than the star. An elegant solution to this problem, first proposed by Lyman Spitzer in 1962, is to employ a starshade, a flower-shaped diffraction screen positioned far in front of a telescope so that it shadows the starlight without blocking the planet light.