Earth as an Exoplanet: A Two-dimensional Alien Map

Abstract

Resolving spatially varying exoplanet features from single-point light curves is essential for determining whether Earth-like worlds harbor geological features and/or climate systems that influence habitability. To evaluate the feasibility and requirements of this spatial-feature resolving problem, we present an analysis of multi-wavelength single-point light curves of Earth, where it plays the role of a proxy exoplanet. Here, ∼10,000 Deep Space Climate Observatory/Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera frames collected over a two-year period were integrated over the Earth’s disk to yield a spectrally dependent point source and analyzed using singular value decomposition. We found that, between the two dominant principal components (PCs), the second PC contains surface-related features of the planet, while the first PC mainly includes cloud information. We present the first two-dimensional (2D) surface map of Earth reconstructed from light curve observations without any assumptions of its spectral properties. This study serves as a baseline for reconstructing the surface features of Earth-like exoplanets in the future.