When
Where
Title
The Starshade for Direct Imaging and Characterization of Exoplanets
Abstract
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. This configuration achieves deep contrast, small working angle, high throughput, and broad bandwidth, and it does so using standard manufacturing tolerances and spaceflight-proven deployments Starshade technology has made great advances over the past decade, culminating earlier this year with the completion of the “Technology Readiness Level 5” work addressing deep contrast, scattered sunlight, formation flying, and mechanical construction and deployment. Several starshade options for the Habitable Worlds Observatory and other mission concepts will be discussed.
Bio
Stuart Shaklan (UA BS in Physics and Astronomy, 1985, Ph.D. Optical Sciences, 1989) has been with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1991. He is the supervisor of the High Contrast Imaging Group and has been a leading member of the starshade team since 2009. His career has focused mainly on the techniques for identifying, imaging, and characterizing exoplanets.
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