Pieter Deroo (JPL) - Spectroscopic Profiling of Exoplanets Atmospheres in the Big Data era

The combined light method has enabled us to characterize the atmospheric composition and conditions of planets up to Super-Earths. This highly successful method relies on extremely accurate calibrated stability. As such, it has pushed us into previously unexplored instrument systematics. Mitigating these small but significant effects is key to enabling exoplanet comparative planetology. I will detail some of the new calibration methods and how the field is moving from single-target analyses to survey investigations. This development allows us to 1) gain unprecedented insight into exoplanets as a class of objects and to 2) improve the robustness of our calibration through the big data approach. I will illustrate this using the WFC3 instrument as a case study, for which more than 100 Hubble orbits were used to guide future observing modes and strategies. The big data analysis on this dataset allowed us to identify the most stable instrument mode and our statistical analysis of 60 visits in scanning mode revealed non-Gaussian statistics which would other ways have gone unnoticed. The explosion of time series spectroscopy observations allows new insight into existing instruments. The era of big data is changing the capabilities of existing instruments and driving the design and data processing architecture of future missions to characterize exoplanet atmospheres.