'The technical and scientific aspects of this project were relatively easy,' Tessenyi said. (Image credit: Blue Skies Space) A new model for astronomy On the left is Science Instrumentation Adviser Giorgio Savini, then the co-founders: Marcell Tessenyi, Giovanna Tinetti and Jonathan Tennyson. The founders of Blue Skies Space, the company behind Twinkle, the world's first commercial astronomy space mission. Still, Tessenyi said that the scientific community was initially reluctant to embrace the idea of Twinkle, the world's first privately funded astronomy mission based on the new-space ethos of fast development and low cost. It wasn't just the gaps in the data that hampered the scientific progress but also the fact that the growing exoplanet community had to compete for time on Hubble (and Spitzer, too) with scientists studying all sorts of other astronomical phenomena.

We don't know for sure what we are looking at.' But Hubble can only do that for a limited range of wavelengths, so there is always uncertainty. 'That tells us something about the different types of chemical compounds in the atmosphere of the exoplanets. 'Hubble can take spectroscopic measurements, which split light into different colors, when it looks at far-away targets,' Tessenyi said. However, in addition to being scarce, the information was also incomplete, providing only the briefest glimpse into the nature of those mysterious worlds and leaving many questions open. Nevertheless, the picture emerging from these scarce datasets was captivating: giant spheres of gas more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius) hot (since then nicknamed hot Jupiters), planets made of diamond, but also Earth-like planets that might harbor life. It was only thanks to clever technical hacks that astronomers managed to tweak the signal returning from these spacecraft to glean some information about those distant planets, Tessenyi added. (Image credit: Blue Skies Space) The problem with Hubbleīoth the veteran Hubble and Spitzer, retired in January 2020, had been conceived before the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992. Warm Neptunes and super Earths are among the strange types of planets known to exist in other solar systems.

Twinkle world