NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) built an ultraviolet camera for NASA’s teeny-tiny SPARCS space telescope, which is about the size of a cereal box. The camera is searching the Milky Way Galaxy for habitable planets. SPARCS, short for Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, launched into space aboard a SpaceX rocket on January 11, carrying aboard JPL’s SparCAM, a custom-built, highly sensitive UV camera system. The camera passed its first tests in space, demonstrating that it is up for the challenge of scouring the cosmos for exoplanets. SPARCS is looking for flares and sunspot activity on low-mass stars, or stars with approximately 30 to 70 percent of the Sun’s mass. These stars are “among the most common in the Milky Way and host the majority of the galaxy’s roughly 50 billion habitable-zone terrestrial planets,” JPL explains in a press release.…