Advanced thermo-structural technologies for the NASA terrestrial planet finder mission

Abstract

The primary objective of the NASA Terrestrial Planet Finder flight missions will be to detect and characterize Earth-like planets around nearby stars. Because of the complexity of the design concepts, the project will rely heavily on the use of analytical simulations to predict on-orbit performance. Furthermore, current understanding of these missions indicates that the 3–8 m class optical systems need to be as stable as picometres in wavefront and sub-milli arcsec in pointing. These extremely small requirements impose on the models a level of predictive accuracy heretofore never achieved, especially in the area of microgravity effects, material property accuracy, thermal solution convergence, microdynamic stability and all other second-order modelling effects typically ignored. New modelling tools and analysis paradigms are developed which emphasize computational accuracy and fully integrated analytical simulations. The process is demonstrated on sample problems using a TPF Coronagraph design concept. The TPF project is also planning a suite of testbeds through which various aspects of the models and simulations will be verified. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.