Exep: Starshade Concept for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (paper)

NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory addresses the challenging goal of characterizing numerous Earth-like exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. While the baseline approach is to carry out the observations with a coronagraph, current planning calls for the observatory to be “starshade ready” so that it can take advantage of the superior throughput, working angle, contrast, and bandwidth when the telescope is paired with a starshade. We describe two starshade designs that together enable imaging in the UV, visible, and NIR bands, as well as a multi-starshade configuration that could efficiently discover and characterize exoplanets. Additionally, we estimate the stellar light leakage and solar light scatter from micrometeoroid impacts and show that after 10 years on orbit, the stellar leakage will have contrast below 10^-11 while solar scatter will be fainter than V=31 mag.