When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.Artist’s concept of NASA’s Pandora mission, which will help scientists untangle the signals from exoplanets’ atmospheres — worlds beyond our solar system — and their stars. | Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image LabSpaceX will launch NASA’s next exoplanet mission on Sunday morning (Jan. 11), and you can watch the action live.A Falcon 9 rocket carrying about 40 payloads, including NASA’s Pandora exoplanet satellite, is scheduled to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base during a 57-minute window that opens at 8:19 a.m. EST (1319 GMT and 5:19 a.m. local California time).AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementYou can watch it live via SpaceX’s website or X account; coverage will begin about 15 minutes before launch.During its yearlong orbital mission, the 716-pound (325 kilograms) Pandora will study at least 20 known exoplanets using a 17-inch-wide (45 centimeters) telescope, which it will train on the worlds as they “transit,” or cross the face of, their host stars from the satellite’s perspective.Such transits cause a small dip in the host star’s brightness, which exoplanet hunters have used to great advantage: Most of the more than 6,000 alien planets we know of have been discovered via the “transit method.”Transits also allow astronomers to characterize known exoplanets, especially their atmospheres. Different elements and molecules absorb light at specific wavelengths, so studying the spectrum of starlight that has passed through an atmosphere can reveal a great deal about that atmosphere’s composition.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHowever, such work is complicated by stellar complexity. Star surfaces are not uniform; they often feature patches of varying brightness, like the sunspots that speckle our own star. Pandora will help astronomers account for such complexity, if all goes to plan.”Pandora aims to disentangle the star and planet spectra by monitoring the brightness of the exoplanet’s host star in visible light while simultaneously collecting infrared data,” NASA officials wrote in a mission description. “Together, these multiwavelength observations will provide constraints on the star’s spot coverage to se …
