Obs. precision estimation for exoplanets atmos. study

This trend is expected to continue with NASA's Pandora Smallsat and Roman Space Telescope and ESA's Ariel mission (all expected to launch within this decade) and NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (expected to launch in the early 2040s), all of which are centered around studying the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Here, we explore a new approach to constructing large-scale exoatmospheric survey lists, which combines the use of traditional transmission/emission spectroscopy figures of merit with a focus on more evenly sampling planets across a range of radii and equilibrium temperatures. After assembling a sample target list comprised of 750 transmission spectroscopy targets and 150 emission spectroscopy targets, we quantify the potential time lost to stale transit and eclipse ephemerides and find that hundreds of hours of space-based observing could be wasted given current uncertainties in orbital periods, transit epochs, and orbital eccentricities.