Nasa’s daring Pandora mission one step closer to probing planets with potential for alien life
NASA’S Pandora mission has moved one step closer to exploring planets which have the potential for alien life.
The team behind the ambitious project have completed construction for the mission’s spacecraft bus which will facilitate the operation.
The bus’ completion was announced during an historic briefing the 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland on Thursday.
The Pandora space mission is expected to launch in autumn 2025.
“This is a huge milestone for us and keeps us on track for a launch in the fall,” Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said.
“The bus holds our instruments and handles navigation, data acquisition and communication with Earth—it’s the brains of the spacecraft.”
A small satellite, dubbed Pandora, will conclude whether 20 other planets is capable of creating alien life.
It is aiming to examine each exoplanet a total of 10 times.
“Although smaller and less sensitive than Webb, Pandora will be able to stare longer at the host stars of extrasolar planets, allowing for deeper study,” Pandora’s co-investigator Daniel Apai said.
“Better understanding of the stars will help Pandora and its ‘big brother,’ the James Webb Space Telescope, disentangle signals from stars and their planets.”
Pandora is the accidental brainchild of one of Apai’s former students.
“In 2018, a doctoral student in my group, Benjamin Rackham—now an MIT research scientist—described an astrophysical effect by which light coming directly from the star muddies the signal of the light passing through the exoplanet’s atmosphere,” Apai explained.
“We predicted that this effect would limit Webb’s ability to study habitable planets.”
To help address this, Pandora will use its Webb-based detector in concert with a unique 45-centimeter aluminum telescope.
“We have a very excited team that has been working hard to have our Mission Operations Center running at full speed at the time of launch and look forward to receiving science data,” Karl Harshman, who heads the Mission Operations Team at the U of A Space Institute that will support the spacecraft’s operation.
“Just this week, we performed a communications test with our antenna system that will transmit commands to Pandora and receive the telemetry from the spacecraft.”
SCAR TREK
It comes after revelations that a terrifying alien planet that “rains glass” lurks just 64.5 lightyears from Earth.
Described as a “nightmare world” by Nasa, the giant exoplanet has staggeringly fast winds that reach up to 5,400mph.
That’s around seven times the speed of sound, Nasa explains.
It’s called HD 189733 b, and is around 11% bigger than Jupiter.
From the outside, it looks like a bright blue planet – almost Earth-like – but that conceals the deadly conditions within.
Temperatures on the planet can range from 919C to 1,220C (1,686F to 2,220F), making it extremely hostile to life.
“The nightmare world of HD 189733 b is the killer you never see coming” Nasa explained.
“To the human eye, this far-off planet looks bright blue.
“But any space traveler confusing it with the friendly skies of Earth would be badly mistaken. The weather on this world is deadly.”
What is Pandora?
Pandora is a small satellite designed to characterize exoplanet atmospheres and their host stars.
It is slated to observe at least 20 different planets during its one year of science operations.
The project is a collaboration between NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA’s Ames Research Center, and a host of other institutions.
Pandora will study planets discovered by other missions using transits, events where planets passing in front of their stars cause tiny dips in starlight.
Scientists are interested in further observing these worlds because transits can also reveal information about the planet’s atmosphere.
Source: NASA