Habitable-Zone Exoplanet Observatory baseline 4-m telescope: systems-engineering design process and predicted structural thermal optical performance

“Are we alone in the Universe?” is maybe the most compelling science question of our generation. Per the 2010 New Worlds, New Horizons decadal survey: “One of the fastest growing and most exciting fields in astrophysics is the study of planets beyond our solar system. The goal is to image rocky planets that lie in the habitable zone of nearby stars.”1 The survey recommended, as its highest priority, medium-scale activity such as a “New Worlds Technology Development Program” to “lay the technical and scientific foundations for a future space imaging and spectroscopy mission.” The National Research Council report, NASA Space Technology Roadmaps & Priorities,2 states that the second-highest technical challenge for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for expanding our understanding of Earth and the universe in which we live is to “develop a new generation of astronomical telescopes that enable discovery of habitable planets, facilitate advances in solar physics, and enable the study of faint structures around bright objects by developing high-contrast imaging and spectroscopic technologies to provide unprecedented sensitivity, field of view (FOV), and spectroscopy of faint objects.”