NASA’s Pandora Probe to Search for Alien Life Will Be Launched by SpaceX
NASA’s Pandora project, which will investigate at least 20 known exoplanets and their host stars to determine how star variations impact our observations of exoplanet atmospheres, has chosen SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, to launch the mission.
NASA declared on February 10 that SpaceX has been given a task order for the launch of the Pandora mission. NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract includes the selection.
Webb will be able to perform more accurate atmospheric measurements thanks to Pandora’s observations, which will let him distinguish the signals from the planet’s atmosphere.
Pandora will make ten observations of each exoplanet during its one-year primary mission, spending twenty-four hours on each visit. The agency’s Astrophysics Pioneers program for low-cost smallsats includes the smallsat mission Pandora. The spacecraft will acquire near-infrared spectra of the transiting planet and measure the host star’s visible and near-infrared brightness concurrently using a novel 17-inch (45-centimeter)-wide all-aluminum telescope.
“Pandora’s primary goal is to probe into the atmospheres of exoplanets using transmission spectroscopy,” explained Elisa Quintana, principal investigator for Pandora, during a Jan. 11 presentation about the mission at a meeting of the Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG).
Pandora is intended to assist researchers in determining if spectral signals observed in specific exoplanets are due to variations in the star itself or the presence of water or hydrogen in the planets’ atmospheres. She explained, “Stars are not uniform.” “Pandora is basically a calibration tool to help deal with this issue.”
Scientists will be able to distinguish between planetary and star signals with more clarity thanks to this, which will improve views from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and upcoming missions that look for habitable worlds, such as the agency’s Habitable Worlds Observatory.
The mission remains on course for a fall launch after NASA said on January 16 that the spacecraft bus for the mission was now finished. Although a launch date was not specified in NASA’s launch contract announcement, Quintana stated during the ExoPAG meeting that they intended to launch as early as September with a rideshare payload.
Pandora is an ESPA Grande-class spacecraft, which is intended to function in a sun-synchronous orbit and contains spacecraft up to 320 kilogrammes in weight. Although neither NASA nor SpaceX provided details, it is possible that Pandora may launch on SpaceX’s Transporter series of specialised rideshare flights that deliver payloads to such orbits.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California collaborated on Pandora. Smaller, less expensive hardware and payloads are used to finance Pandora and other astrophysics science missions through the Astrophysics Pioneers program, which is run by the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
