Completion of model validation experiments at the Princeton starshade testbed

Following the results of Starshade Milestone 1 in which we demonstrated broadband contrast better than 10-10, we have performed model validation experiments to show that diffraction models accurately predict the contrast due to perturbations representing the building blocks of the instrument error budget. The perturbations include the displacement of petal edge segments, sinusoidal petal edge shape deformations, global petal position errors, and random petal radial placement errors. We also show that the model accurately predicts the combined effects of two errors. The experiments result in a measured Model Uncertainty Factor (MUF) that is then applied to the starshade instrument contrast error budget.