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Small Pandora Satellite to Open the Box of Secrets of Alien Worlds

Despite decades of space exploration, we still don’t know for a fact that there are alien civilizations out there. But at least now we know without a doubt that there are enough planets in the galaxy that could sustain them.
Pandora SmallSat 1 photo
Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
According to NASA, over 4,000 exoplanets were discovered orbiting distant Suns so far, and the number is likely to increase as more and more observation hardware is thrown into the fight. A number of 20 such planets will soon become the focus of a mission called Pandora, meant to determine the composition of their respective atmospheres better.

Pandora is one of three projects NASA gave the green light to as part of its low-cost astrophysics program called Pioneers. It is, in fact, a SmallSat satellite, weighing less than 180 kg (397 pounds) and the size of a large kitchen fridge.

Pandora will be placed in Sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit so that our solar system's star is always behind it. It will be directed at target planets to observe both them and their stars in visible and infrared light for long observation periods.

Unlike other similar systems currently in use, Pandora should separate stellar and exoplanetary signals by observing them simultaneously, thus eliminating problems caused by light variation in the target stars.

“Exoplanetary science is moving from an era of planet discovery to an era of atmospheric characterization,” said in a statement Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the principal investigator for Pandora.

“Pandora is focused on trying to understand how stellar activity affects our measurements of exoplanet atmospheres, which will lay the groundwork for future exoplanet missions aiming to find planets with Earth-like atmospheres.”

Pandora has been designed to work in conjunction with the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope. It is run by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

A launch date for the mission and the target planets have not yet been announced.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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