Overview and reassessment of noise budget of starshade exoplanet imaging

Abstract

High-contrast imaging enabled by a starshade in formation flight with a space telescope can provide a near-term pathway to search for and characterize temperate and small planets of nearby stars. NASA's Starshade Technology Development Activity to TRL5 (S5) is rapidly maturing the required technologies to the point at which starshades could be integrated into potential future missions. Here we reappraise the noise budget of starshade-enabled exoplanet imaging to incorporate the experimentally demonstrated optical performance of the starshade and its optical edge. Our analyses of stray light sources - including the leakage through micrometeoroid damage and the reflection of bright celestial bodies - indicate that sunlight scattered by the optical edge (i.e., the solar glint) is by far the dominant stray light. With telescope and observation parameters that approximately correspond to Starshade Rendezvous with Roman and HabEx, we find that the dominating noise source would be exozodiacal light for characterizing a temperate and Earth-sized planet around Sun-like and earlier stars and the solar glint for later-type stars. Further reducing the brightness of solar glint by a factor of 10 with a coating would prevent it from becoming the dominant noise for both Roman and HabEx. With an instrument contrast of 1E-10, the residual starlight is not a dominant noise; and increasing the contrast level by a factor 10 would not lead to any appreciable change in the expected science performance. If unbiased calibration of the background to the photon-noise limit can be achieved, Starshade Rendezvous with Roman could provide nearly photon-limited spectroscopy of temperate and Earth-sized planets of F, G, and K stars <4 parsecs away, and HabEx could extend this capability to many more stars <8 parsecs. (Abridged)