TPF-O design reference mission - art. no. 668714

The Terrestrial Planet Finder-Occulter (TPF-O) is a proposed mission to find and characterize planets around nearby stars. It uses a telescope and an external occulter to suppress the starlight so that the planets close to the star can be observed. We have constructed Design Reference Missions (DRMs) that show that the TPF-O architecture can achieve the science requirements. A 4.0 meter telescope and occulter system should be able to find Earth-like planets in the equivalent search space of 42.7 continuous habitable zones (CHZ) and characterize the planets including detection of water (at 1000 ppm) and oxygen (at 21 %) in the planet's atmosphere. With a smaller telescope (2.4 meter) and occulter, we can still probe 21.9 CHZs and detect water and oxygen in many of the planets detected.