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Pandora Mission Exoplanet Study

12:07 recording · AUTO · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

NASA's mini-fridge-sized Pandora mission separates stellar activity from exoplanet atmospheres, complementing JWST on a $20 million budget.

  1. Stars, not planets, are the hard partSubtracting the stellar spectrum is far harder than theory suggests because spots and flares keep changing.
  2. Long stares beat big telescopes hereEach of the 10 transits per target runs 24 hours, giving out-of-transit baseline JWST cannot spare time for.
  3. A $20 million mission trains people tooPandora's graduate student shadow program and postdoc commissioning roles are stated as one of its main goals.
Executive Summary AI
  • Host Andres Almeida introduces Pandora, a new and relatively small NASA mission built to fix the problem that a host star's light interferes with spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres.0:28
  • Associate Project Scientist Dr. Emily Gilbert of Caltech, who joined as the project's first graduate student shadow under project scientist Nicole Colon, explains that Pandora's goal is to disentangle stellar activity — spots and flares — from what transmission spectroscopy shows of planet atmospheres.1:40
  • Pandora's strategy is 10 transits of each of its 20 prime mission targets, each observation lasting 24 hours, using simultaneous optical photometry to characterise the star and near infrared spectroscopy to characterise the planet, so a signal such as water can be traced to the planet rather than to cool star spots.2:36
  • One prime target, TUI 674b, overlaps with JWST observations slated for May and June, so Pandora will try to schedule six transits simultaneously with JWST's six and add four more, each with 24 hours of baseline against JWST's few hours.4:41
  • Pandora belongs to Pioneers, a NASA astrophysics class with a $20 million cost cap selected first in 2021 alongside Pueo, Aspera and Starburst; a small team, daily science-engineering meetings and internal simulation software took it from selection to launch in about five years.9:47
Key Quote
“It's relatively small in size, but it promises big results.”
— Andres Almeida0:32
Key Quote
“But it turns out that stars are not always well behaved and subtracting off this stellar spectrum is more difficult than you might think.”
— Emily Gilbert2:14
Key Quote
“So Pandora is nominally a small sat, but it's perhaps a little bigger than you'd think. It's roughly the size of maybe a mini fridge.”
— Emily Gilbert6:26