Open Access
6 January 2021 Demonstration of deployment repeatability of key subsystems of a furled starshade architecture
Manan Arya, Flora S. Mechentel, David R. Webb, John B. Steeves, Doug Lisman, Stuart B. Shaklan, Samuel C. Bradford, Eric Kelso, Kenzo Neff, Amanda Swain, Andrei Iskra, Neal Beidleman, John D. Stienmier, Gregg Freebury, Andrew Tomchek, Tayler Thomas, Craig Hazelton, Kassi Butler, Kamron Medina, Mike Pulford, Larry Adams, David Hepper, Dana Turse
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

Starshade concepts must be stowed within rocket fairings for launch and then deployed in space. The in-plane deployment accuracy must be on the order of hundreds of micrometers for sufficient starlight suppression to enable the detection and study of Earth-like exoplanets around nearby Sun-like stars. We describe tests conducted to demonstrate deployment repeatability of two key structural subsystems of the “furled” starshade architecture—the petal and the inner disk. Together, the petals and the inner disk create the in-plane shape of a starshade. Test articles to represent the petal and inner disk subsystems were constructed at relevant scales for a 26-m-diameter starshade. These test articles were subjected to stowage-and-deployment cycles and their shapes were measured. The measured performance—tens of parts per million of petal strain after deployment, and hundreds of micrometers of inner disk deployment accuracy—was found to be within required allocations.

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.
Manan Arya, Flora S. Mechentel, David R. Webb, John B. Steeves, Doug Lisman, Stuart B. Shaklan, Samuel C. Bradford, Eric Kelso, Kenzo Neff, Amanda Swain, Andrei Iskra, Neal Beidleman, John D. Stienmier, Gregg Freebury, Andrew Tomchek, Tayler Thomas, Craig Hazelton, Kassi Butler, Kamron Medina, Mike Pulford, Larry Adams, David Hepper, and Dana Turse "Demonstration of deployment repeatability of key subsystems of a furled starshade architecture," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 7(2), 021202 (6 January 2021). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.7.2.021202
Received: 29 July 2020; Accepted: 6 November 2020; Published: 6 January 2021
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CITATIONS
Cited by 6 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Tolerancing

Computer programming

Error analysis

Thermal effects

Temperature metrology

Exoplanets

Interfaces

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