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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.