NASA’s EXCITE Warrior Sets Its Gaze on Tidal-Locked “Hot Jupiters” Beyond Our Solar System.
NASA has announced preparations for the first test flight of the EXCITE, which stands for “Exoplanet Climate Infrared Telescope.”
This advanced instrument is designed to study the atmospheres of exoplanets. The initial target will be the tidal-locked hot Jupiters, one of the most extreme types of planets in the universe.
NASA’s EXCITE Telescope at the production facility – (Photo: NASA).
“Hot Jupiters” are gas giants that are comparable in size and mass to our Jupiter, and in some cases, they can be much larger.
Some of these planets orbit so close to their parent star that they become tidal-locked, meaning the star’s strong gravitational pull keeps them rotating with only one hemisphere facing the star.
A typical example of tidal locking is our Moon, which always shows the same face to Earth.
This tidal locking turns “Hot Jupiters” into two-faced planets, with one side scorching hot, where metals can evaporate into clouds, while the other side remains significantly cooler.
Previously, other NASA telescopes have helped humanity discover the existence of these extreme planets, as well as gain preliminary insights and arguments about them.
However, to specifically understand what lies within the atmospheres of these “hellish” worlds and what is happening there, NASA needs a more powerful warrior.
EXCITE’s mission is to observe how temperature varies across the planet, from the hot hemisphere facing the star to the relatively cooler nighttime side.
It will also determine how molecules in the atmosphere of a world absorb and emit light across its entire orbit.
This data could not only unveil the chemical composition of those distant worlds—such as the presence of water, methane, carbon dioxide, and other compounds—but also how they circulate globally as the planet orbits its star.
Predecessor telescopes like Hubble, James Webb, and Spitzer have gathered some of these measurements.
For instance, in 2014, Hubble and Spitzer observed an exoplanet named WASP-43b. To collect data over a 22-hour Earth day on that planet, they had to leverage and filter data from 60 hours of Hubble observations and 46 hours from Spitzer.
However, these telescopes are also engaged in numerous other missions, making such “data-harvesting” studies increasingly complicated and challenging.
Thus, we turn to EXCITE – a balloon-borne telescope operating at the poles and at an altitude of 99.5% of the atmosphere’s thickness.
This allows it to have a more convenient view of targets and clearer observations without the interference of atmospheric noise.
Before that, EXCITE must complete its test flight from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Antarctica. In this region, it can observe target stars that never set, effectively doubling the amount of data collected.
