Pandora, NASA’s latest mission focused on exoplanets, has marked a significant step towards its launch by finishing the construction of the spacecraft bus, which serves as the mission’s ‘brain’ by providing the necessary structure, power, and systems for its operations. The University of Arizona leads Pandora’s exoplanet science working group, and this will be the first mission to operate from the U of A Space Institute.
This announcement about the bus’s completion was made during a press conference at the 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in National Harbor, Maryland, on January 16.
Elisa Quintana, the principal investigator for Pandora at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, remarked, “This is a significant milestone and keeps us on schedule for a fall launch. The bus is responsible for holding our instruments and managing navigation, data collection, and communication with Earth — it’s essentially the spacecraft’s brain.”
Pandora is a compact satellite designed to extensively study at least 20 known exoplanets orbiting distant stars, focusing on the composition of their atmospheres, including the presence of clouds, hazes, and water. The information gathered will provide a solid basis for interpreting data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and future missions that seek potentially habitable worlds.
Daniel Apai, co-investigator of Pandora and a professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the U of A Steward Observatory and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, noted, “While Pandora is smaller and less sensitive than Webb, it will be able to monitor the stars of these exoplanets for longer periods, allowing us to conduct more thorough examinations. A greater understanding of these stars will enhance both Pandora’s capabilities and those of the James Webb Space Telescope to differentiate signals from stars and their planets.”
Astronomers can analyze an exoplanet’s atmosphere when it transits in front of its star as viewed from Earth. During this transit, some of the star’s light passes through the planet’s atmosphere before reaching Earth, leading to a unique interaction that conveys information about atmospheric components, which can be observed as dips in brightness at specific wavelengths.
The idea for Pandora arose as a solution to a challenge involving the observation of starlight as it travels through the atmospheres of exoplanets, according to Apai.
“In 2018, a doctoral student in my team, Benjamin Rackham, who is now an MIT research scientist, identified an astrophysical effect where light from the star interferes with the signal from light passing through the exoplanet’s atmosphere,” Apai elaborated. “We believed this effect would restrict Webb’s capabilities in studying habitable planets.”
Telescopes collect light from the entire star rather than just the small portion that interacts with the planet. Stellar surfaces display inconsistencies, showcasing regions that are either hotter and brighter—known as faculae—or cooler and darker, akin to sunspots, both of which shift and change with the star’s rotation. This variability in light can complicate the task of distinguishing signals from a star’s appearance from those that have passed through an exoplanet’s atmosphere. For instance, changes in the star’s brightness can obscure or resemble signals indicating the presence of water, which researchers consider crucial in assessing an exoplanet’s potential for supporting life.
Pandora employs a cutting-edge, all-aluminum telescope that measures 45 centimeters in width, developed collaboratively by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Corning Specialty Materials in Keene, New Hampshire. This telescope will enable Pandora’s detectors to concurrently analyze each star’s visible brightness and near-infrared spectrum while also capturing the near-infrared spectrum of the transiting planet. This synergistic data collection will help the science team identify stellar surface characteristics and effectively separate the signals from stars and planets.
The operational strategy of the mission leverages its ability to observe targets continuously for long durations, a capability that flagship observatories like Webb can’t provide regularly due to high demand and limited available observation time.
Throughout its year-long mission, Pandora is set to observe a minimum of 20 exoplanets ten times each, with each observation lasting a comprehensive total of 24 hours. Each of these observations will include a transit event, during which the mission will obtain the spectrum of the planet.
Karl Harshman, who leads the Mission Operations Team at the U of A Space Institute and will manage the spacecraft’s operations post-launch, stated, “Our team is very enthusiastic and has been diligently working to have our Mission Operations Center fully operational by launch time. We are eager to begin receiving scientific data. We also conducted a communications test this week with our antenna system, which will be responsible for sending commands to Pandora and receiving telemetry data from the craft.”
Pandora is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with project management and engineering provided by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The telescope was produced by Corning in collaboration with Livermore, which also contributed to the development of imaging detector assemblies, the electronic control systems for the mission, and all thermal and mechanical subsystems. NASA Goddard supplied the infrared sensor. Meanwhile, Blue Canyon Technologies provided the spacecraft bus and is managing the assembly, integration, and environmental testing. Data processing for the mission will be conducted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, with support from a range of additional universities assisting the science team.
