A small NASA spacecraft sent the first images of the search for habitable exoplanets outside the Solar System. They arrived on February 6 and were subsequently processed.
With the first images of the spacecraft in hand, the team behind NASA’s Star-Planet Activity Survey CubeSat, or SPARCS, is ready to begin mapping Earth’s energetic life to help answer one of humanity’s deepest questions: Which distant worlds beyond our Solar System might be habitable?
Initial images, or “first light,” mark the moment when a mission proves that its instruments are working in space and ready to begin full scientific operations.
This milestone is especially important for SPARCS, whose observations rely on high-precision ultraviolet (UV) measurements, making demonstrating the camera’s performance crucial to achieving its scientific goals.
About the size of a large cereal box, SPARCS will monitor solar flares and sunspot activity on low-mass stars — objects with just 30% to 70% the mass of the Sun.
These stars are home to most of the roughly 50 billion terrestrial planets in the galaxy’s habitable zone, which are close enough to their stars to have temperatures that could allow liquid water to exist and potentially support life.
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Seeing the first ultraviolet images from SPARCS from orbit is incredibly exciting. They tell us that the spacecraft, telescope and detectors are working as tested on the ground and that we are ready to begin the science we created this mission for,” says Evgenya Shkolnik, SPARCS principal investigator and professor of Astrophysics in the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Arizona State University, who is leading the mission.
Although these stars are small, faint and cool compared to the Sun, they are also known to emit flares much more frequently than the star in our solar system. These eruptions can drastically affect those they shelter. Understanding the host star is critical to understanding the habitability of a planet.
The technology used in the mission paves the way for future ones and takes advantage of advances in computational processing, with an onboard computer capable of processing data and intelligently adjusting observation parameters to better sample the development of solar flares as they occur.
