NASA Wants to Build a 'Starshade' to Hunt Alien Planets. Here's How It Would Work
NASA Wants to Build a 'Starshade' to Hunt Alien Planets. Here's How It Would Work
By Mike Wall 16 hours ago Tech
Such a mission would have to keep two spacecraft, separated by thousands of miles, aligned within 3 feet of each other.
An artist's depiction of a sunflower-shaped starshade that could help space telescopes find and characterize alien planets.(Image: © NASA/JPL/Caltech)
Starshade exoplanet-hunting missions may be technologically daunting, but they're not beyond NASA's reach, recent research suggests.
Such a mission would employ a space telescope and a separate craft flying about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) ahead of it. This latter probe would be equipped with a large, flat, petaled shade designed to block starlight, potentially allowing the telescope to directly image orbiting alien worlds as small as Earth that would otherwise be lost in the glare.
(Instruments called coronagraphs, which have been installed on multiple ground-based and space telescopes, work on the same light-blocking principle. But coronagraphs are incorporated into the telescope itself.)
There are no starshade missions on NASA's books as of yet. For such a project to work, the two spacecraft would need to be aligned incredibly precisely — to within about 3 feet (1 meter) of each other, NASA officials said.
More:
https://www.space.com/starshade-exoplanet-formation-flying-tech.html
