Artist’s concept of the Pandora mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechHost Andres Almeida: For decades, scientists have been studying exoplanets, or worlds outside our solar system, using several methods. One way is by measuring the light that passes through a planet’s atmosphere, a process called spectroscopy.This helps us figure out what that planet is made of. Does it have a mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere? Maybe methane? Something else?
But it’s not always so easy. The light from the planet’s host star can interfere, making the data harder to interpret.
Luckily, there’s a new NASA mission for that. And it’s called Pandora.
It’s relatively small in size, but it promises big results.
Associate Project Scientist Dr. Emily Gilbert of Caltech is going to tell us about Pandora on this episode of Small Steps, Giant Leaps.
[Intro music]
Welcome to Small Steps, Giant Leaps, the podcast from NASA’s Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, or APPEL. I’m your host, Andres Almeida. Let’s get into it.
Host: Hey, Emily, welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Emily Gilbert: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
Host: Tell us a bit about your job and your role with the Pandora mission.
Dr. Gilbert: So, I first started out working on Pandora as a graduate student. I was actually the project’s first graduate student shadow, and I shadowed Knicole Colón, Pandora’s project scientist from the very early days of the project.
I’m currently the associate project scientist and one of the co-leads of the supporting observations science working group where we’re working on getting additional data sets to improve Pandora science.
Host: Can you tell us a bit more about Pandora?
Dr. Gilbert: Yeah! So, Pandora’s goal is to disentangle stellar activity signals – so, spots and flares occurring on the surface of the star – from what we can see in planet atmospheres.
So, we’re using a technique called transmission spectroscopy. And the way this wor …
