The fictional Magic School Bus enables its passengers to explore scientific phenomena, such as dinosaurs. Now, a non-fictional Space Bus named Pandora is ready to investigate celestial mysteries, like exoplanets that orbit small stars.
The team that conceived of and built Pandora — consisting of scientists from institutions including NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Arizona — announced its completion at an American Astronomical Society press briefing in Maryland.
The Pandora satellite will study at least 20 known planets orbiting distant stars. It will probe the makeup of their atmospheres – especially looking for hazes, clouds and water.
Learning About Exoplanets
Pandora will begin its drive in the fall 2025, although there is not yet an official launch date. While naming the exploration vehicle a bus is standard practice when referring to any spacecraft body designed to carry scientific instrumentation, its use this time is especially apt.
Pandora, like its cartoon counterpart, will be largely used by young scientists like graduate students and research fellows.
Young Scientists at the Wheel
Given that use, it’s appropriate that a young scientist conceived part of Pandora’s capabilities to help solve a data collection issue experienced by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Measuring the atmosphere of a planet passing its host star can be tricky. Instruments must capture the light spectrum both before and during the planet’s passage across the star, according to Daniel Apai, a University of Arizona researcher who helped design some of Pandora’s instrumentation.
“If you do things well, the star can be cancelled out,” says Apai. Only the spectral “fingerprint” of the planet’s atmosphere will remain.
However, this calls for precision. Some host stars don’t always cooperate. Spots or different patterns on some stars’ surfaces can contaminate measurements.
Giving the Webb a Helping Hand
The Webb telescope can only look at planets passing stars for a short period. Pandora is designed to take its time. Its instruments will focus on planets in transit around small stars for a longer period than the Webb can, and, in doing so, can help resolve any discrepancies with the Webb data. In 2018, Apai’s then graduate student Benjamin Rackham (now a researcher at MIT) proposed this approach.
“Pandora is flying to help clear up what part of the signal is coming from the host star and what part of the signal is coming from the planet,” says Apai. Essentially, the Webb can take a snapshot of a planet’s passage, while Pandora’s ability is more akin to filming a movie.
Pandora is also noteworthy because it is one of the first projects to come out of the NASA Pioneers Program, which was created in 2020.
“Science moves so quickly that NASA wanted to have a path to respond to exciting science questions faster,” Apai says.
The new program funds smaller projects that are less costly than large ones. They may carry more risk, but the costs are relatively low — especially in comparison to larger, more expensive projects like the Webb.
Read More: 6 Exoplanets in our Universe That Could Support Life Other Than Earth
University Mission Control
And, in keeping with the Magic Bus theme of encouraging younger people to take a larger role in science, Pandora’s mission control will operate out of the University of Arizona where scientists will manage it there, rather than from at one of NASA’s facilities.
“It's pretty exciting to bring mission operations so close and into a university campus,” says Apai.
Apai, other astrophysicists, and astronomy fans, can now begin the countdown to discovering more about exoplanets — including potentially habitable ones — in our solar system.
Article Sources
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University of Arizona. NASA's Pandora mission one step closer to probing alien atmospheres, with mission operations based at U of A
NASA. Astrophysics Pioneers
Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
