Related papers: Global Mapping of the Surface Composition on an Ex…
The time series of light reflected from exoplanets by future direct imaging can provide spatial information with respect to the planetary surface. We apply sparse modeling to the retrieval method that disentangles the spatial and spectral…
Unmixing the disk-integrated spectra of exoplanets provides hints about heterogeneous surfaces that we cannot directly resolve in the foreseeable future. It is particularly important for terrestrial planets with diverse surface compositions…
Planned missions will spatially resolve temperate terrestrial planets from their host star. Although reflected light from such a planet encodes information about its surface, it has not been shown how to establish surface characteristics of…
Resolving spatially-varying exoplanet features from single-point light curves is essential for determining whether Earth-like worlds harbor geological features and/or climate systems that influence habitability. To evaluate the feasibility…
Characterizing the surfaces of rocky exoplanets via the scattered light will be an essential challenge to investigate the existence of life on habitable exoplanets. We present a simple reconstruction method for fractional areas of different…
As a test-bed for future investigations of directly imaged terrestrial exoplanets, we present the recovery of the surface components of the Earth from multi-band diurnal light curves obtained with the EPOXI spacecraft. We find that the…
This work concerns a detailed review of data analysis methods used for remotely sensed images of large areas of the Earth and of other solid astronomical objects. In detail, it focuses on the problem of inferring the materials that cover…
Scattered lights from terrestrial exoplanets provide valuable information about the planetary surface. Applying the surface reconstruction method proposed by Fujii et al. (2010) to both diurnal and annual variations of the scattered light,…
Finding potential life harboring exo-Earths is one of the aims of exoplanetary science. Detecting signatures of life in exoplanets will likely first be accomplished by determining the bulk composition of the planetary atmosphere via…
We develop an inversion technique of annual scattered light curves to sketch a two-dimensional albedo map of exoplanets in face-on orbits. As a test-bed for future observations of extrasolar terrestrial planets, we apply this mapping…
With the increasing number of directly imaged giant exoplanets the current atmosphere models are often not capable of fully explaining the spectra and luminosity of the sources. A particularly challenging component of the atmosphere models…
Reflected light photometry of terrestrial exoplanets could reveal the presence of oceans and continents, hence placing direct constraints on the current and long-term habitability of these worlds. Inferring the albedo map of a planet from…
The direct detection of exoplanets with high-contrast instruments can be boosted with high spectral resolution. For integral field spectrographs yielding hyperspectral data, this means that the field of view consists of diffracted starlight…
We develop a new retrieval scheme for obtaining two-dimensional surface maps of exoplanets from scattered light curves. In our scheme, the combination of the L1-norm and Total Squared Variation, which is one of the techniques used in sparse…
Transit spectroscopy is a powerful tool to decode the chemical composition of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. In this paper we focus on unsupervised techniques for analyzing spectral data from transiting exoplanets. We demonstrate…
Planetary atmospheres are inherently 3D objects that can have strong gradients in latitude, longitude, and altitude. Secondary eclipse mapping is a powerful way to map the 3D distribution of the atmosphere, but the data can have large…
We present a novel method for direct detection and characterization of exoplanets from space. This method uses four collecting telescopes, combined with phase chopping and a spectrometer, with observations on only a few baselines rather…
We develop a new method for analytical inversion of binned exoplanet transit spectra and for retrieval of planet parameters. The method has a geometrical interpretation and treats each observed spectrum as a single vector $\vec r$ in the…
Airborne gamma-ray surveys are useful for many applications, ranging from geology and mining to public health and nuclear security. In all these contexts, the ability to decompose a measured spectrum into a linear combination of background…
Future telescopes will characterize rocky exoplanets in reflected light, revealing their albedo, which depends on surface, cloud, and atmospheric properties. Identifying these features is crucial for assessing habitability. We present…