NASA’s Pandora small satellite is preparing to launch to low Earth orbit, where it will study exoplanet atmospheres and their stars.
Pandora is part of the Twilight rideshare mission with SpaceX and is set to launch aboard the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX is targeting launch at 8:44 a.m. EST (5:44 a.m. PST) today from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. A live webcast of this mission will begin at 8:30 a.m. , watch the launch coverage here.
Pandora will examine at least 20 exoplanets, which are worlds outside our solar system, previously discovered by missions including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Kepler, and TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), along with their host stars. Pandora’s observations will build on these discoveries by determining whether a planet’s atmosphere contains hazes, clouds, or water, or whether the signals of those substances come from the star. It will conduct long, continuous observations as the planets orbit their respective host stars, simultaneously collecting visible and near-infrared light. This data will help researchers distinguish between information about the planet and the star.
The data Pandora collects will help interpret measurements from Webb and future missions.
Two NASA-sponsored CubeSats will launch with Pandora and other commercial payloads. The first is NASA’s SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat), led by Arizona State University in Tempe, and the second is BlackCAT (Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope), built and operated at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, funded by NASA’s Astrophysics Research and Analysis program.
The SPARCS CubeSat, supported by Maverick Space Systems, is a telescope about the size and s …