Open Access
4 June 2021 Starshade Rendezvous: exoplanet orbit constraints from multi-epoch direct imaging
Andrew Romero-Wolf, Geoffrey Bryden, Greg Agnes, Jonathan W. Arenberg, Samuel Case Bradford, Simone D'Amico, John Debes, Matt Greenhouse, Renyu Hu, Steve Matousek, Jason Rhodes, John Ziemer
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Abstract

The addition of an external starshade to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will enable the direct imaging of Earth-radius planets orbiting at ∼1 AU. Classification of any detected planets as Earth-like requires both spectroscopy to characterize their atmospheres and multi-epoch imaging to trace their orbits. We consider here the ability of the Starshade Rendezvous Probe to constrain the orbits of directly imaged Earth-like planets. The target list for this proposed mission consists of the 16 nearby stars best suited for direct imaging, around which ∼10 to 15 planets are expected to be discovered. Of these planets, ∼1 to 2 will be Earth-like in mass and temperature. The field of regard for the starshade mission is constrained by solar exclusion angles, resulting in four observing windows during a two-year mission. We find that for Earth-like planets that are detected at least three times during the four viewing opportunities, their semi-major axes are measured with a median precision of 7 mas, or a median fractional precision of 3%. Habitable-zone planets can be correctly identified as such 96.7% of the time, with a false positive rate of 2.8%. If a more conservative criteria are used for habitable-zone classification (95% probability), the false positive rate drops close to zero, but with only 81% of the truly Earth-like planets correctly classified as residing in the habitable zone.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Andrew Romero-Wolf, Geoffrey Bryden, Greg Agnes, Jonathan W. Arenberg, Samuel Case Bradford, Simone D'Amico, John Debes, Matt Greenhouse, Renyu Hu, Steve Matousek, Jason Rhodes, and John Ziemer "Starshade Rendezvous: exoplanet orbit constraints from multi-epoch direct imaging," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 7(2), 021219 (4 June 2021). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.7.2.021219
Received: 25 January 2021; Accepted: 20 May 2021; Published: 4 June 2021
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Cited by 1 scholarly publication.
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KEYWORDS
Planets

Stars

Exoplanets

Imaging systems

Signal to noise ratio

Observatories

Telescopes

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