A pathfinder for imaging exo-Earths

Surface biosignatures of exo-earths: remote detection of extraterrestrial life.

Exoplanet discovery has made remarkable progress, with the first rocky planets having been detected in the central star's liquid water habitable zone. The remote sensing techniques used to characterize such planets for potential habitability and life rely solely on our understanding of life on Earth. The vegetation red edge from terrestrial land plants is often used as a direct signature of lif...

Multispectral Imaging from Mars Pathfinder

The Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) was a mast-mounted instrument on the Mars Pathfinder lander which landed on Mars’ Ares Vallis floodplain on July 4, 1997. During the 83 sols of Mars Pathfinders landed operations, the IMP collected over 16,600 images. Multispectral images were collected using twelve narrowband filters at wavelengths between 400 and 1000 nm in the visible and near infrared (V...

High-dispersion spectroscopy of extrasolar planets: from CO in hot Jupiters to O2 in exo-Earths.

Ground-based high-dispersion spectroscopy could reveal molecular oxygen as a biomarker gas in the atmospheres of twin-Earths transiting red dwarf stars within the next 25 years. The required contrasts are only a factor of 3 lower than that already achieved for carbon monoxide in hot Jupiter atmospheres today but will need much larger telescopes because the target stars will be orders of magnitu...

PathFinder : A Tool for Design

Analyzing Pathfinder data using virtual reality and superresolved imaging

The Mars Pathfinder mission used a unique capability to rapidly generate and interactively display three-dimensional (3-D) photorealistic virtual reality (VR) models of the Martian surface. An interactive terrain visualization system creates and renders digital terrain models produced from stereo images taken by the Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) camera. The stereo pipeline, an automated mach...