Guest Editorial: Overview of the Special Issue and a Dialog on Starshades

This special issue is dedicated to starshades: science, engineering, technology and programmatics. Our reasons for organizing this special issue are several fold. First as a new technology and with research accomplished in many institutions, recent results are widely scattered in the literature. As such, we see great value in co-locating many of the most recent results. This guest editorial summarizes the 19 contributed papers as the result of a special call for papers. Since this is a rapidly maturing technology, we wanted to co-locate a primer with the most current work in the field. It is hoped that this primer will provide a tutorial to the starshade concept and pathway to the literature not in this issue. In doing so, we hope to widen the starshade community in terms of engineering and scientific engagements. This tutorial takes the form of a dialog, where frequently asked questions are answered.