AI and the World's Hard Problems · Astronomy & space · arXiv · 2026-10-20
Towards the Habitable Worlds Observatory: Retrieval of Reflection Spectra from Evolving Earth Analogues using 1D CNNs
The Habitable Worlds Observatory will characterize Earth-like exoplanets from low-resolution reflected-light spectra. The authors trained a 1D CNN on 109,945 simulated spectra for Archean, Proterozoic, and modern atmospheres to see which gases can be recovered. Modern ozone was recovered very well (R² ≈ 0.98), while modern methane was recovered poorly (R² = 0.32–0.35). The results also show that detectability depends on the molecule and on the noise level.