Starshade Rendezvous: Exoplanet Sensitivity and Observing Strategy

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of a starshade rendezvous with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to directly image habitable exoplanets, assess zodiacal dust, and analyze gas-giant atmospheres, providing detailed sensitivity calculations and observing strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed sensitivity analysis and an observing strategy for a starshade-Roman mission to detect and characterize exoplanets and related phenomena.

Findings

Sensitivity estimates for detecting habitable exoplanets, zodiacal dust, and gas giants.

A publicly available Python code for sensitivity calculations.

An optimized observing strategy within mission constraints.

Abstract

Launching a starshade to rendezvous with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope would provide the first opportunity to directly image the habitable zones of nearby sunlike stars in the coming decade. A report on the science and feasibility of such a mission was recently submitted to NASA as a probe study concept. The driving objective of the concept is to determine whether Earth-like exoplanets exist in the habitable zones of the nearest sunlike stars and have biosignature gases in their atmospheres. With the sensitivity provided by this telescope, it is possible to measure the brightness of zodiacal dust disks around the nearest sunlike stars and establish how their population compares to our own. In addition, known gas-giant exoplanets can be targeted to measure their atmospheric metallicity and thereby determine if the correlation with planet mass follows the trend observed in the Solar System and hinted at by exoplanet transit spectroscopy data. In this paper we provide the details of the calculations used to estimate the sensitivity of Roman with a starshade and describe the publicly available Python-based source code used to make these calculations. Given the fixed capability of Roman and the constrained observing windows inherent for the starshade, we calculate the sensitivity of the combined observatory to detect these three types of targets and we present an overall observing strategy that enables us to achieve these objectives.