Analysis assesses wavelength cutoff effects on exoplanet yield in architecture design, indicating optimal regions for NUV and NIR spectra.
Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will search for biosignatures from Earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. The wavelength range is a critical driver for HWO architecture designs and science return. We evaluate the NUV, Visible, and NIR spectral characterization yields in a large parameter sweep over aperture diameter, optical system throughput, starlight suppression system inner working angle, core throughput, contrast, contrast stability, exozodi brightness and exozodi calibration residual. We also explore discrete options in wavelength cutoff (for the NUV and NIR), spectral resolution, and SNR. We train a Random Forest model on the parameter sweeps and invert it to find regions of architecture space which yield 25 exo-Earths in the visible and indicate which parts of architecture space may best enable NUV and NIR yields.
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Morgan et al. (2025) studied this question.
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