Spotlight

There are about seventy-five billion terrestrial planets in our one Milky Way galaxy with temperatures capable of supporting surface life. The vast majority of these orbit low-mass stars which are known to be strong ultraviolet (UV) emitters with frequent and energetic flares. Knowing the UV environments of planets of all sizes is crucial to understanding their atmosphericcomposition and evolution. Characterization of the UV environment can provide a key parameter in a planet’s potential to be habitable and helps us to discriminate between biological and abiotic sources for observed biosignatures, gases we hope will be signs of life.？ ？ 

Prof. Shkolnik will present NASA’s SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) mission, which will be the first mission to provide the time dependent spectral slope, intensity, and evolution of UV radiation of low-mass stars including the strongest and rarest flares. As demonstrated by planet atmosphere models, these measurements are crucial to interpreting observations of planetary atmospheres around low mass stars. For this we must extend our UV time-domain knowledge from a timescale of half a day to months. A dedicated monitoring experiment, such as SPARCS, is the only way this is achievable.

SPARCS will be a 6U CubeSat devoted to monitoring 20 low-mass stars in two UV bands: SPARCS far-UV (S-FUV: 153–171 nm) and SPARCS near-UV (S-NUV: 260–300 nm). For each target, SPARCS will observe continuously between one and three complete stellar rotations (5–30 days) over a mission lifetime of one year. SPARCS will also achieve the technology demonstration of JPL-developed UV `2D-doped' (i.e., delta- and superlattice-doped) detectors and detector-integrated metal dielectric filters (MDF) in an operational environment.