An occulter is a spacecraft with a precisely-shaped optical edges which flies in formation with a telescope, blocking light from a star while leaving light from nearby planets unaffected. Using linear optimization, occulters can be designed for use with telescopes over a wide range of telescope aperture sizes, science bands, and starlight suppression levels. It can be shown that this optimization depends primarily on a small number of independent nondimensional parameters, which correspond to Fresnel numbers and physical scales and enter the optimization only as constraints. We show how these can be used to span the parameter space of possible optimized occulters; this data set can then be mined to determine occulter sizes for various mission scenarios and sets of engineering constraints.

Date Published: 15 September 2011
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8151, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets V, 815112 (15 September 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.892742

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8151:
Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets V
Stuart Shaklan, Editor(s)