James Webb

[Anomalocaris]

An occulting habitable planet might reveal the content of its atmosphere by absorption of star light refracted though its atmosphere during the occultation.   Admittedly the signal would be extremely weak.   But given that 30 years ago we were confidently predicting stellar occultation by habitable planet would itself be too weak a phenomenon to ever be useful, I suspect absorption by atmosphere during occultation would also be teased out of the data within a decade or two.


Here is an animation of the deployment of the perspective occulting disk for a space telescope https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/21...animation/