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Future astrophysics missions will seek extraterrestrial life via transmission and direct imaging observations. To assess habitability and biosignatures, we need robust retrieval tools to analyze observed spectra, and infer surface and atmospheric properties with their uncertainties. We use a novel retrieval tool to assess accuracy in characterizing near-surface habitability and biosignatures via simulated transmission and direct imaging spectra, based on the Origins Space Telescope (Origins) and LUVOIR mission concepts. We assess our ability to discriminate between an Earth-like and a false-positive O₃ TRAPPIST-1 e with transmission spectroscopy. In reflected light, we assess the robustness of retrieval results to un-modeled cloud extinction. We find that assessing habitability using transmission spectra may be challenging due to relative insensitivity to surface temperature and near-surface H₂O abundances. Nonetheless, our order of magnitude H₂O constraints can discriminate extremely desiccated worlds. Direct imaging is insensitive to surface temperature and subject to the radius/albedo degeneracy, but this method proves highly sensitive to surface water abundance, achieving retrieval precision within 0. 1% even with partial clouds. Concerning biosignatures, Origins-like transmission observations (t=40 hours) may detect the CO₂/CH₄ pair on M-dwarf planets and differentiate between biological and false positive O₃ using H₂O and abundant CO. In contrast, direct imaging observations with LUVOIR-A (t=10 hours) are better suited to constraining O₂ and O₃, and may be sensitive to wavelength-dependent water cloud features, but will struggle to detect modern Earth-like abundances of methane. For direct imaging, we weakly detect a stratospheric ozone bulge by fitting the near-UV wings of the Hartley band.
Gilbert-Janizek et al. (Mon,) studied this question.