Identifying Surface Degeneracies in Single-Visit Reflected Light Observations of Modern Earth using the Habitable Worlds Observatory

Characterizing the surface and atmosphere of Earth-like planets in reflected light is a key goal for upcoming direct imaging surveys.

NASA’s next flagship-class astrophysics mission concept, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), is a space-based Ultraviolet/Optical/Near-Infrared observatory with a mission design requirement to reach the 10−10 contrast necessary to characterize Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars.

While reflected light from planetary surfaces provides a unique opportunity to constrain the coverage of surface materials and biopigments, detailed predictions of HWO’s ability to retrieve surface fractions are necessary but have not been conducted.

Here, we model photon-counting noise from astrophysical, instrumental, and post-processing sources for the HWO Exploratory Analytic Case 5 design equipped with a charge-6 vector-vortex coronagraph. By combining our photon-counting noise with five distinct modern Earth models at quadrature, we simulate single-visit HWO observations and perform spectral retrievals using the open-source code 𝙿𝙾𝚂𝙴𝙸𝙳𝙾𝙽 to assess our ability to constrain both the surface and atmospheric composition.

We find that degeneracies between planetary radius, surface pressure, surface material, and cloud coverage in reflected-light retrievals can significantly complicate the classification of surface features. These degeneracies can complicate the detection of surface biopigments, such as the chlorophyll-induced red edge on modern Earth.

Our work shows that developing concrete strategies for detecting surface features and breaking degeneracies in reflected-light observations of Earth-like planets is a critical priority for mission design and data analysis.

Aiden S. Zelakiewicz, Elijah Mullens, Lisa Kaltenegger, Dmitry Savransky

Comments: Submitted to JATIS HWO Special Edition
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.25694 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2603.25694v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.25694
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Submission history
From: Aiden Zelakiewicz
[v1] Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:41:17 UTC (11,128 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25694
Astrobiology, biosignatures,