occulter

The first 'occulter' spacecraft casts a perfectly controlled shadow onto the face of the second, carrying the mission instruments.

Space Business and Industry News at SpaceMart.com 2009

An occulter system may ultimately not be the technology selected for the job, but it is a serious contender.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

One proposal, years in the making, involves sending into deep space a football-field-sized sunshade, that would then work in tandem with an orbiting telescope 35,000 to 50,000 miles away to create an “occulter.”

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

Many technical and bureaucratic and especially financial challenges remained, but the occulter plan now had a little blue sky.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

But the future for the occulter, or something like the occulter, looked bright.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

She grew especially animated about the possibilities of launching an “occulter”—a flat, football-field-sized, petal-shaped sunshade that Seager and others hope will one day be sent into deep space and aligned with a similarly stationary but space-based telescope.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

In its place, NASA is considering a plan to design and launch an occulter and connect it with the James Webb Space Telescope, the highly sophisticated and very expensive successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and scheduled to launch in 2014.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

Both teams came up with what were considered to be feasible plans to use an occulter and a dedicated small space telescope together, and both were submitted in 2009 to NASA and to an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which every ten years reviews all branches of space science and, with input from the scientists, sets priorities for the next decade.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

But a year later, when I met Soummer in his office in Baltimore, the wedding of the Webb to an occulter looked far more promising than anyone could have imagined.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011

He also came away with a wonderful connection to the ultimate solar system occulter, and a sense that even very small odds of success can sometimes pan out.

First Contact Marc Kaufman 2011