The agency wants to hunt exoplanets, so it’s designing star shades and coronagraphs that block out starlight and give telescopes a clear view.
. Of the two, the LUVOIR project’s proposal is closest to the design specs required by the Astro2020 survey, in that it was designed with a coronagraph alone and a large 8-meter telescope. “It’s true that if you could make a star shade work with LUVOIR, you could probably get better quality spectra of the planets,” says Roberge, a study scientist for the LUVOIR proposal. “But we judged that the coronagraph was absolutely necessary, and we got good enough spectra with that alone.
Yet a star shade, which must fly separately from the telescope, poses some challenges that a coronagraph doesn’t. The need for a separate power source would limit the uses of the craft to around 100 observations or so before it would need to be scrapped or refueled. It would also require the two crafts to engage in a delicate, coordinated flight.
And then, of course, there is the matter of it unfurling like origami. Arya and others have been working on that task, crafting several large-scale test star shades made from blanket-like Kapton polymer sheets and an unfolding carbon fiber frame. It’s not easy. The edge of a star shade’s petals must be extremely sharp to reflect as little sunlight as possible into the telescope, and any perturbations could affect exoplanet imaging.
Star shades may also be useful for more than deep space missions. NASA has given Mather’s team funding to study using an orbiting star shade to spot exoplanets from Earth., or Orbiting Configurable Artificial Star, would be the first hybrid ground-space observatory, using a laser beacon in space to help focus a terrestrial telescope, therefore cutting out the distortion caused by looking through the atmosphere.
A decision on which of these projects will go forward is still many years out. Direction for HabEx and LUVOIR might come during a NASA Town Hall at the American Astronomical Society meeting on January 11, and the ORCAS and RemoteOcculter mission proposals are still being studied. But the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in December, will soon be beaming back images made with the help of its lower-contrast star shade.
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