Post 2: Star Shades - Marie Marchant




A goal of NASA for a while, has been to discover other planets in our galaxy and throughout the univrese similar to Earth.  Scientists have been indirectly detecting exoplanets for about 15 years, however taking a photo of these planets is incredibly difficult. Detecting the light of a planet next to a star which is a billion times brighter than a planet can get complicated. 

While our visit at NASA JPL, we were able to talk to Brenden Crill about NASA’s new project to help counter their troubles when it comes to photographing these planets. JPL is working on something called a star shade. Essentially they are creating a flower shaped shade to block the star's light from ever reaching the telescope and allowing light to be cast on only the planets. This method is called starlight suppression. The flower shape is intended to deter light from bending around the shade, which would occur if it was a flat circle. These petals present a huge engineering challenge in order for this shade to be able to be sent into space and deploy properly. The engineering team brought in an expert origami folder to help them with this intense task. 

I found this part of our NASA visit incredibly fascinating. The physics and level of engineering behind this machine is beyond anything I could imagine. These star shades are made to precisely match up with the telescope over thousands of kilometers. However, one of the star shades strengths is simplicity as far as the telescope it will be using. Due to the star’s light not reaching the telescope when in use, this allows for a much simpler telescope system to be used. Another advantage is that the star shade can be used with a multi-purpose telescope allowing astronomers in other fields to gain access to useful information as well. 

The way in which the star shade is designed is not for aesthetic purposes but in order to not allow light to bend around the shade. However, the shade is surprisingly similar to medieval times representation of the sun, or how one would draw a cartoon sun. The way in which the aesthetic design was created out of pure functionality is rare, yet another reason why I find the star shade project so thrilling from an artist’s standpoint.

The star shade project has so many exciting potential discoveries for the future. A star shade mission could allow astronomers to directly photograph and image exoplanets that are roughly earth sized and rocky. Which is impossible to do from our home planet.

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