On Jan. 11, 2026, I watched anxiously at the tightly controlled Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA’s new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit.
Exoplanets—worlds orbiting other stars—are notoriously difficult to observe. From Earth, they appear as incredibly faint dots lost in the glare of their host stars, which are millions or billions of times brighter. The Pandora telescope will complement NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in the search for these distant planets and the stars they orbit.
As an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona specializing in planets around other stars and astrobiology, I am a co-investigator of Pandora and lead its exoplanet science working group. We designed Pandora to overcome a key obstacle—a source of noise in data—that currently limits our ability to study smaller exoplanets and search for signs of life.
Observing Exoplanets: A Trick of the Light
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Astronomers employ a clever technique to study exoplanet atmospheres: observing the planets as they pass in front of their host stars. This allows us to study starlight filtered through the planet’s atmosphere.
These observations, known as planetary transits, are akin to examining a glass of red wine held up to a candle. The light passing through reveals subtle details about the wine’s quality. Similarly, analyzing starlight filtered through an exoplanet’s atmosphere can reveal the presence of water vapor, hydrogen, clouds, and even potential biosignatures. Researchers refined these transit observations in 2002, opening a new window onto these alien worlds.
For a time, the method seemed flawless. However, starting in 2007, astronomers noticed that starspots—cooler, active regions on stars—could disrupt transit measurements.
In 2018 and 2019, then-Ph.D. student Benjamin V. Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampapa, and I published a series of studies demonstrating how darker starspots and brighter, magnetically active regions can mislead exoplanet measurements. We termed this issue the “transit light source effect.”
Most stars are spotted, active, and constantly changing. We showed that these changes alter the signals from exoplanets. Compounding the problem, some stars possess water vapor in their upper layers—often more concentrated in starspots. This can confuse astronomers, leading them to mistakenly identify water vapor on a planet.
Our research, published three years before the James Webb Space Telescope’s 2021 launch, predicted that Webb might not reach its full potential. We raised a warning: astronomers were attempting to assess their “wine” by candlelight.
Blue Canyon Technologies
Pandora: A New Approach to Exoplanet Research
For me, Pandora began with an email from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2018. Scientists Elisa Quintana and Tom Barclay proposed a rapid-build space telescope to address stellar contamination and aid Webb. It was an ambitious idea, given the complexity of space telescopes.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab, CC BY
Pandora represents a departure from NASA’s traditional approach. We proposed and built it faster and at a lower cost, accepting some increased risk to accelerate the timeline.
What Sets Pandora Apart?
While smaller than Webb and collecting less light, Pandora offers a unique capability: it can patiently monitor stars to understand how their atmospheres change.
By continuously observing a star for 24 hours using visible and infrared cameras, Pandora will measure subtle shifts in brightness and color. It will record the rotation of active regions and the formation and dissipation of starspots. Unlike Webb, which rarely revisits the same planet with the same settings and seldom monitors host stars, Pandora will revisit its targets ten times over a year, dedicating over 200 hours to each.
This data will allow our team to determine how stellar changes affect observed planetary transits. By combining Pandora’s data with Webb’s, we will gain an unprecedented understanding of exoplanet atmospheric composition.
Following a successful launch, Pandora is now orbiting Earth approximately every 90 minutes. Blue Canyon Technologies, Pandora’s primary builder, is currently conducting thorough testing of its systems and functions.
Control of the spacecraft will transition to the University of Arizona’s Multi-Mission Operation Center in Tucson, Arizona, within a week. Then, our science teams will begin their work in earnest, capturing starlight filtered through the atmospheres of other worlds—and observing them with a new, steady eye.
