NASA’s Pandora telescope will study stars in detail to learn about the exoplanets orbiting them
On January 11, 2026, I watched anxiously at the tightly controlled Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as an impressive SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched NASA’s new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit.
Exoplanets are worlds orbiting other stars. They are very difficult to observe because, when viewed from Earth, they appear as extremely faint spots right next to their host stars, which are millions or even billions of times brighter, and drown out the light reflected by the planets. The Pandora Telescope will join and complement NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to study these distant planets and the stars they orbit.
I am a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, specializing in the study of planets around other stars and in astrobiology. I am Pandora’s co-investigator and lead its exoplanet science working group. We built Pandora to break a barrier – to understand and remove a source of noise in the data – that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them.
Observe exoplanets
Astronomers have a trick for studying the atmospheres of exoplanets. By observing planets as they orbit in front of their host stars, we can study the starlight filtering through their atmospheres.
These planetary transit observations are similar to holding a glass of red wine to a candle: the light filtering through will show fine details that reveal the quality of the wine. By analyzing starlight filtered through the atmospheres of planets, astronomers can find evidence of water vapor, hydrogen, clouds and even look for evidence of life. Researchers improved observations of public transportation in 2002, opening an exciting window into new worlds.
For a while it seemed to work perfectly. But, starting in 2007, astronomers noticed that starspots – cooler, active regions on stars – could disrupt transit measurements.
In 2018 and 2019, then a doctoral student. Student Benjamin V. Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampapa and I published a series of studies showing how darker star spots and brighter, magnetically active stellar regions can seriously mislead measurements of exoplanets. We have dubbed this problem the “transit light source effect.”
Most stars are dappled, active, and continually changing. Ben, Mark and I have shown that these changes modify signals from exoplanets. To make matters worse, some stars also have water vapor in their upper layers – often more prominent in star spots than outside them. This and other gases may confuse astronomers, who might think they have found water vapor on the planet.
In our papers – published three years before the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope – we predicted that the Webb would not be able to reach its full potential. We have sounded the alarm. Astronomers realized that we were trying to judge our wine by the light of flickering, unstable candles.
The birth of Pandora
For me, Pandora began with an intriguing email from NASA in 2018. Two prominent scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Elisa Quintana and Tom Barclay, asked to chat. They had an unusual plan: They wanted to build a space telescope very quickly to help combat stellar contamination – in time to help Webb. It was an exciting idea, but also very challenging. Space telescopes are very complex and not something you would normally want to put together in a hurry.
Pandora breaks with the conventional NASA model. We proposed and built Pandora faster and at a significantly lower cost than typically used on NASA missions. Our approach was to keep the mission simple and accept a little higher risk.
What makes Pandora special?
Pandora is smaller and can’t collect as much light as its big brother Webb. But Pandora will do what Webb can’t: She will be able to patiently observe stars to understand how their complex atmospheres change.
By observing a star for 24 hours with visible and infrared cameras, it will measure subtle changes in the star’s brightness and colors. As the star’s active regions rotate in and out of view and starspots form, evolve and dissipate, Pandora records them. While Webb very rarely returns to the same planet in the same instrument configuration and almost never monitors its host stars, Pandora will revisit its target stars 10 times a year, spending more than 200 hours on each one.
With this information, our Pandora team will be able to understand how changes in stars affect observed planetary transits. Like Webb, Pandora will also observe planetary transit events. By combining data from Pandora and Webb, our team will be able to understand in more detail than ever before what exoplanet atmospheres are made of.
After this successful launch, Pandora now circles the Earth approximately every 90 minutes. Pandora’s systems and features are currently being thoroughly tested by Blue Canyon Technologies, the primary manufacturer of Pandora.
Approximately one week after launch, control of the spacecraft will be transferred to the University of Arizona Multi-Mission Operations Center in Tucson, Arizona. Then the work of our science teams will begin in earnest, and we will begin capturing starlight filtered through the atmospheres of other worlds – and observing them with a new and stable eye.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization that brings you trusted facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Daniel Apai, University of Arizona
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Daniel Apai is a professor of astronomy, planetary sciences, and optical sciences at the University of Arizona. It receives funding from NASA.
