Special Section on Starshades: Overview and a Dialogue

This special section is dedicated to starshades: science, engineering, technology, and programmatics. Our reasons for organizing this special section 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 colocating 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 colocate 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 section. In doing so, we hope to widen the starshade community in terms of engineering and scientific engagements. This tutorial takes the form of a dialogue, where frequently asked questions are answered.