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The design and scale of a future mission to directly image and characterizepotentially Earth-like planets will be impacted, to some degree, by theexpected yield of such planets. Recent efforts to increase the estimatedyields, by creating observation plans optimized for the detection andcharacterization of Earth-twins, have focused solely on coronagraphicinstruments; starshade-based missions could benefit from a similar analysis.Here we explore how to prioritize observations for a starshade given thelimiting resources of both fuel and time, present analytic expressions toestimate fuel use, and provide efficient numerical techniques for maximizingthe yield of starshades. We implemented these techniques to create anapproximate design reference mission code for starshades and used this code toinvestigate how exoEarth candidate yield responds to changes in mission,instrument, and astrophysical parameters for missions with a single starshade.We find that a starshade mission operates most efficiently somewhere betweenthe fuel- and exposure-time limited regimes, and as a result, is less sensitiveto photometric noise sources as well as parameters controlling the photoncollection rate in comparison to a coronagraph. We produced optimistic yieldcurves for starshades, assuming our optimized observation plans are schedulableand future starshades are not thrust-limited. Given these yield curves,detecting and characterizing several dozen exoEarth candidates requires eithermultiple starshades or an eta_Earth > ~0.3.

Maximized ExoEarth Candidate Yields for Starshades