In order to reveal planets around another star, a starshade needs to fly 40,000 km away from a telescope, aligned within only 1 meter

If NASA sends a Starshade into space, it will need to perform some very accurate formation flying with the space telescopes it is working with.

“The distances we’re talking about for the starshade technology are kind of hard to imagine. If the starshade were scaled down to the size of a drink coaster, the telescope would be the size of a pencil eraser and they’d be separated by about 60 miles [100 kilometers]. Now imagine those two objects are free-floating in space. They’re both experiencing these little tugs and nudges from gravity and other forces, and over that distance we’re trying to keep them both precisely aligned to within about 2 millimeters.”

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