Requirements on the stellar rejection for the Darwin Mission

Lisa Kaltenegger; Anders L. Karlsson

doi:10.1117/12.551459

20 October 2004 Requirements on the stellar rejection for the Darwin Mission

Lisa Kaltenegger, Anders L. Karlsson

Proceedings Volume 5491, New Frontiers in Stellar Interferometry; (2004) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.551459
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2004, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Abstract

We investigate whether the design of the DARWIN nulling interferometer can be simplified, while maintaining or even improving its performance, by accepting somewhat higher levels of stellar leakage. We establish detailed requirements on stellar suppression for a nulling interferometer, considering a realistic DARWIN stellar target sample. The dominating noise source, represented by the local zodiacal cloud, is essentially constant for all target stars while the stellar leakage decreases as the inverse of the distance squared. This means that such stellar leakage has an effect on the integration times of near-by target stars, while for more distant targets its influence decreases significantly. We assess the impact of different types of nulling profiles and identify those stars for which the detection sensitivity can be maximised.

Citation Download Citation

Lisa Kaltenegger and Anders L. Karlsson "Requirements on the stellar rejection for the Darwin Mission", Proc. SPIE 5491, New Frontiers in Stellar Interferometry, (20 October 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.551459

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