Testing Starshade Manufacturing and Deployment Through NASA's Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions Program
Abstract
An external occulter 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 before entering the observatory, greatly relaxing the requirements on the telescope and instrument. In this poster we report on the results of our two Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions (TDEM) studies. In the first we examined the manufacturability and metrology of starshade petals, successfully constructing a full size petal from flight like materials and showing through precise edge shape measurements that an occulter made with petals consistent with the measured accuracy would achieve close to 10^-10 contrast. Our second TDEM tested the deployment precision of a roughly half-scale starshade. We demonstrated the deployment of an existing deployable truss outfitted with four sub-scale petals and a custom designed central hub. We showed that the system can be deployed multiple times with a repeatable positioning accuracy of the petals better than the requirement of 1.0 mm. The combined results of these two TDEM projects has significantly advanced the readiness level of occulter technology and moved the community closer to a realizable mission.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #223
- Pub Date:
- January 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014AAS...22334413K