A paper by Logan A. Pearce and Ewan S. Douglas proposes 27 known giant exoplanets as possible first targets for the Lazuli Space Observatory’s ExtraSolar Coronagraph (ESC). The proposed campaign would study the planets in reflected starlight, as described in the authors’ arXiv preprint.
The authors submitted the paper to arXiv on October 22, 2026, and revised it on October 28.
How Lazuli would study the candidates
The proposed observations would use starlight reflected from the planets to detect them and characterize their atmospheres. The count of 27 refers to the known giant planets proposed for a possible first campaign.
Some candidates may also be accessible to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s coronagraph and ELT-METIS, potentially allowing complementary atmospheric observations, the paper says.
What Lazuli’s preliminary design says
A separate preliminary design paper describes Lazuli as a 3-meter space observatory designed to operate across wavelengths from 400 to 1,700 nanometers. Its planned instruments are the Wide-field Context Camera (WCC), the Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS), and the ESC.
The design gives the WCC a 35′ × 12′ field of view and the IFS a spectral resolving power of about 100–500. For the ESC, it projects raw contrast of 10⁻⁸ and processed contrast approaching 10⁻⁹. These instrument specifications describe the preliminary design.
The design also calls for a 3:1 lunar-resonant orbit and a target-of-opportunity response time under four hours.
