NASA is set to launch a new telescope in the search for signs of life beyond Earth, and it is far smaller than the observatories we are used to, weighing just 716 pounds and measuring 17 inches across.
According to Times, the telescope launching in 2026, Pandora will focus on 20 carefully selected exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars. It will stare at each one for up to 24 hours at a time, repeating those marathon sessions again and again.
That intense observation is meant to capture the chemical fingerprints in their atmospheres, clues that could reveal whether any of these distant planets might support life. The mission builds on decades of exoplanet discoveries, from Kepler’s thousands of finds to Webb’s detailed atmospheric measurements.
The work Pandora does will be more challenging than just looking at the filtered starlight and copying down the chemistry it reveals. That’s because stars are not steady, unchanging sources of illumination.
There are brighter, hotter regions on the surface called faculae, and cooler darker ones similar to sunspots. They change and grow and shrink and move as the star rotates, and can bollix up the readings the astronomers are trying to take.
As per Ben Hord, a NASA postdoctoral program fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center who spoke at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society last January, variations in the light of the star can mimic or erase the signal of water.
Teasing apart those false signals from the true ones across the chemical spectrum is the reason Pandora spends so much time, star by star, in its observation sessions.
