The New Worlds Observer is a flagship-scale terrestrial planet finding and characterizing mission using an external occulter known as a starshade. The starshade is a separate space vehicle from the observing telescope; the starshade performs all the necessary starlight suppression to enable high contrast imaging of terrestrial exo-planets. While effective as a flagship-scale mission designed to fulfill and exceed the requirements of the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission, the starshade architecture is flexible and can accommodate a variety of design and cost categories, including working with an existing telescope. We present in this paper an architecture using a starshade with the James Web Space Telescope (JWST), a mission concept we call New Worlds Probe, which can deliver many of the TPF mission requirements for significantly lower mission cost. We give an overview of the science capabilities, the starshade design and technical maturity, and concepts for starshade-JWST cooperative operation.

Date Published: 9 August 2010
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 7731, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave, 77312E (9 August 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.856270

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7731:
Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2010: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave
Jacobus M. Oschmann Jr.; Mark C. Clampin; Howard A. MacEwen, Editor(s)