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Starshade
Seeking Earth-like planets
in our solar neighborhood
Starshade
Does life exist on other worlds?
Technology development
Is our planet unique? Are we alone in the universe? Recent
technological advances will allow us to start answering
these questions within a decade. The Starshade, in
development by Northrop Grumman, is a mission using an
external occultor to study planetary systems around the
closest stars.
The Starshade technology is one of the top candidates for
a mission in the next decade and a top priority for technology development. Northrop Grumman leads the mission
and system design for Starshade and is developing the
design, requirements and error budget for the Starshade
using detailed computer simulations.
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, but they
are generally quite close to their parent star, while planets
resembling Earth, Venus and Mars would have the best
chance to be hospitable to life as we know it. In addition,
almost all of the known exoplanets have been discovered
by indirect means.
Laboratory and field tests have been conducted with scale
model occulters to prove that the Starshade functions as
expected. Component hardware has been built to determine
the state-of-the-art capability to produce the required
structure.
The next breakthrough will come with the Starshade
enabling direct imaging and spectroscopy of a planet in the
“habitable zone” around a nearby star—something that a
Starshade mission is designed to do.
Starshade
The innovative Starshade concept uses a large screen,
shaped like a daisy to allow a companion space telescope
to detect extrasolar planets around stars up to 50 light
years from Earth.
• The problem
At a distance of 10 parsecs (33 light years), a star like our
Sun would outshine a planet in the habitable zone by a
factor of 10 billion and would be separated by only 0.1 arcsecond (1/36,000th of a degree) away, making the planet
impossible to view.
Bright Star Vega
• The solution
The Starshade solves this by suppressing the light from
a star by more than 1010, while leaving the telescope a
clear line of sight to the planet. To do both these things at
once, it must be placed tens of thousands of kilometers
from a 2.4-meter-class telescope.
Exosolar
System
To Earth (1.5 million km)
Vega Occulted by Starshade
L2
1.5 million km
35 m tip-to-tip
Starshade
40,000 km
separation
2.4 m telescope
As the telescope progresses along the orbit around the Earth-Sun L2
point, the Starshade is repositioned around the sky to align with target
stars, then held in position along the line of sight to each star, allowing
the telescope to observe the exosolar system around each target.
www.northropgrumman.com/aerospacesystems
© 2016 Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation
Printed in USA
15-2572 • AS • BP • 01/16 • 73390
Images of Vega collected at the McMath Solar Observatory show the
power of Starshades. A 1-second exposure of Vega (top image) is
completely saturated, while a 20-minute exposure of Vega obscured by
a Starshade (bottom image) allows much dimmer stars in the proximity of
Vega to be seen. All other optics are the same between the two images.