Thermal emission measurements of exoplanets - dominated by data from the spitzer space telescope - are our only window into the temperature structure of exoplanetary atmospheres. Our current…

This is a grant award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) to re-analyze data from the Spitzer Space Telescope on exoplanet atmospheres. The grant, valued at $341,974.82, will fund the development of improved data analysis techniques to better understand the temperature structure and molecular composition of exoplanet atmospheres based on the Spitzer eclipse measurements. The award is not associated with a set-aside, and there are no major subcontractors mentioned. This research aims to resolve questions that have recently arisen about the conclusions drawn from the original Spitzer data analyses, in order to provide a stronger foundation for future exoplanet observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Thermal emission measurements of exoplanets - dominated by data from the spitzer space telescope - are our only window into the temperature structure of exoplanetary atmospheres. Our current understanding of the temperatures and molecular abundances in giant exoplanets is built on the foundation of spitzer's eclipse measurements. Exoplanet eclipses are an order of magnitude smaller than the instrument signatures in spitzer data. Corrections for spitzer's instrumental signatures depend on data analyses techniques that have evolved considerably since the first eclipse detections a decade ago. However, several of the key conclusions from spitzer's eclipses have recently been questioned based on new analyses. Resolving those questions requires improved data analysis techniques. Fortunately, we have recently developed a new and powerful data analysis method that can significantly strengthen and improve the spitzer analyses. Nearly simultaneously, powerful bayesian temperature and abundance retrieval techniques have emerged, that can robustly define the range of temperature structure and molecular mixing ratios that are consistent with the spitzer data. Those retrievals are especially valuable when applied to a group of planets that have been measured using uniformly consistent analysis techniques. We propose to RE-analyze all of spitzer's secondary eclipse data using a uniform and improved method. Our results will address the temperature structure and abundances in hot jupiter to hot neptune atmospheres, and will define and focus the future questions to be answered via spectroscopy from jwst.