NASA's Pandora mission

in Popular STEM17 hours ago

NASA's Pandora mission




On January 11, the Pandora mission was launched, it is a NASA mission. It is a very cheap mission, because it has only cost between 20 to 30 million dollars, that is millions of dollars, but for a space mission it is a bargain, it is ultra-low, budget.


The point is that the Pandora mission is a small satellite - telescope dedicated to the study of exoplanets and their parent stars, it will orbit the Earth about 600 km away and its mission will last approximately one year. Its primary objective is to search for the atmospheric signals of the exoplanets by “cleaning”, this is the important detail that it will do, cleaning the signals or stellar contamination that may affect the reading of those planetary atmospheres.




At the moment the only way we have to analyze an exoplanetary atmosphere is when the planet passes in front of its star (atmospheric or exoplanetospheric spectrography), then a small part of the light from that star passes through the atmosphere of the planet, and that is what we can capture. We have to have telescopes like the James Web or like this one, for example, and with this we can analyze what gases it has, if there is oxygen, nitrogen, what does it have.


The point is that when it passes in front of the star, the star does not emit a perfect light, but rather it may have brightness alterations, there may be a sunspot that coincides just at that moment in that area, there may be alterations and that is what it will clean, that will be the main task of this small space observatory, cleaning those measurements, in fact, it has already been assigned 20 different exoplanets of size ranging from Earth to Jupiter to analyze those atmospheres and clean those analyses.


It will begin to analyze these 20 exoplanets, which are the first ones assigned to it and then there will be many more for the moment. As of today, January 19, everything is going well, communication has already been established with ground control and it is in the initial phase of checks and commissioning.



Official website




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