Abstract
A leading design concept for NASA's upcoming planet-finding space telescope involves placing an occulter 72,000 km in front of a 4-m telescope. The purpose of the occulter is to block the bright starlight thereby enabling the telescope to take pictures of planets orbiting the blocked star. Unfortunately, diffraction effects prevent a simple circular occulter from providing a sufficiently dark shadow—a specially shaped occulter is required. In this paper, I explain how to reduce this shape-optimization problem to a large-scale linear programming problem that can be solved with modern LP tools.
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Vanderbei, R.J. (2009). Eliminating Poisson's Spot with Linear Programming. In: Chinneck, J.W., Kristjansson, B., Saltzman, M.J. (eds) Operations Research and Cyber-Infrastructure. Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces, vol 47. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-88843-9_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-88843-9_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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