The effects of scheduling constraints on exoplanet imaging science yield

NASA is currently developing the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) in response to the recommendations of the 2020 decadal survey. One of the objectives of this mission will be to discover and characterize Earth-like exoplanets residing in the habitable zones of their host stars via reflected-light imaging. In order to ensure success for missions such as HWO, it is imperative to be able to project the impacts of engineering design decisions on potential mission outcomes (or science yields). As we do not yet know the exact demographics of Earth-like exoplanets, nor know of the specific objects that HWO will observe, these projections must be inherently probabilistic. Our past work has demonstrated that scheduling constraints can potentially have a large, and often underestimated, impact on science yield. Here, we refine our previously developed methodology (based on efficient graph searches) for estimating the effects of schedulability on mission yield. We apply this methodology to an analysis of detection observations of Earth-like exoplanets about likely HWO targets. In particular, we explore the deviation between optimal mission yield (computed by maximizing accumulated completeness with no scheduling constraints) and expected mission yield under scheduling constraints.