A new NASA spacecraft called Pandora is awaiting launch ahead of its journey to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, and their stars.
Along for the ride are two shoebox-sized satellites called BlackCAT (Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope) and SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat), as NASA innovates with ambitious science missions that take low-cost, creative approaches to answering questions like, “How does the universe work?” and “Are we alone?”
All three missions are set to launch Jan. 11 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The launch window opens at 8:19 a.m. EST (5:19 a.m. PST). SpaceX will livestream the event.
“Pandora’s goal is to disentangle the atmospheric signals of planets and stars using visible and near-infrared light,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This information can help astronomers determine if detected elements and compounds are coming from the star or the planet — an important step as we search for signs of life in the cosmos.”
BlackCAT and SPARCS are small satellites that will study the transient, high-energy universe and the activity of low-mass stars, respectively.
Pandora will observe planets as they pass in front of their stars as seen from our perspective, events called transits.
As starlight passes through a planet’s atmosphere, it interacts with substances like water and oxygen that absorb characteristic wavelengths, adding their chemical fingerprints to the signal.
But while only a small fraction of the star’s light grazes the planet, telescopes also collect the rest of the light emitted by the star’s facing side. Stellar surfaces can sport brighter and darker regions that grow, shrink, and change position over time, suppressing or magnifying signals from planetary atmospheres. Adding a further complication, some of these areas may contain the same chemicals that astronomers hope to find in the planet’s atmosphere, such as water vapor.
All these factors make it difficult to be certain that important detected molecules come from the planet alone.
Pandora will help address this problem by providing in-depth study of at least 20 exoplanets and their host stars during its initial year. The satellite will look at each planet and its star 10 times, with each observation lasting a total of 24 hours. Many of these worlds are among the over 6,000 discovered by missions like NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
read more: https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/nasas-pandora-satellite-cubesats-to-explore-exoplanets-beyond/
