NASA’s Pandora satellite mission controllers received full acquisition of signal from the spacecraft on Jan. 11 on the first ground pass after liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Pandora will study planets outside our solar system – called exoplanets – discovered by other missions to gain information about the planets’ atmospheres and how their stars may produce or affect the signals we detect from them.
When a planet passes in front of its host star, substances in its atmosphere can absorb some of that light. Astronomers can measure these effects to determine the presence of specific elements and compounds. But the star can also produce the same signals, and activity on its surface can suppress or magnify those from the planet.
Pandora will monitor the brightness of the exoplanet’s host star in visible light while simultaneously collecting near-infrared data from both the star and the planet. It will study each system 10 times for 24 hours at a time. Together, these long multiwavelength observations will help separate the signals from the stars and the planets.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, leads Pandora for the agency. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides project management and engineering for the mission. Pandora’s telescope was manufactured by Corning and developed collaboratively with Livermore, which also developed the imaging detector assemblies, the mission’s control electronics, and all supportin …