The Carl Sagan Institute: Pale Blue Dot and Beyond was founded in 2014 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to further the search for habitable planets and moons in and outside the Solar System.
[1] The main goal of the Carl Sagan Institute is to model atmospheric spectral signatures including biosignatures of known and hypothetical planets and moons to explore whether they could be habitable and how they could be detected.
[5] Team scientists used 137 different microorganism species, including extremophiles that were isolated from Earth's most extreme environments, and cataloged how each life form uniquely reflects sunlight in the visible and near-infrared to the short-wavelength infrared (0.35–2.5 μm) portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
[6] This database of individual 'reflection fingerprints' (spectrum) might be used by astronomers as potential biosignatures to find large colonies of microscopic life on distant exoplanets.
[8][9] An exoplanet orbiting an M-type star with these life forms would glow when exposed to solar flares, allowing it to be detected by the new generations of space observatories.