Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigS
JWST is the only instrument I'm aware of that will be capable of directly detecting the atmospheric composition of only the closest exo-planets (presently ~20 Lyrs, or so) .. and this remains to be verified.
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My above statement has spurred me on to check my updatedness, and I find
a recently released (Nov 2011) paper which claims confirmed detection of a strong 3.3 micron feature, (corresponding to the methane v3 branch) in remote detection of the atmosphere of HD 189733b (a hot Jupiter ~63 Lyrs distant).
The detection was done with the Spex spectrograph at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility atop Mauna Kea.
As far as observing Habitable Super-Earth atmospheres, the main issue here is their small size, low temperature and their relatively large separation from their star. In principle, it appears they can be observed at low resolution in the Mid-IR, provided their hosting star is a bright M dwarf. While most of the Sun’s neighbourhood is composed of these late-type stars, dedicated technology is needed to increase the numbers of known instances. The 2MASS catalogue sample and space-bound WISE and GAIA programs are targetting at this goal over the next five years.
Cheers