NASA has identified more than 6,000 exoplanets—planets orbiting stars outside of Earth’s solar system—as part of missions to seek signs of life and improve information about planetary formation. Many of these exoplanets were discovered using the transit method to observe tiny dips in the amount of light coming from a star, which indicate that a planet has moved in front of it. Telescopes including the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite have been instrumental to the research.
Following the exoplanets’ identification, researchers are beginning to examine their atmospheres and histories. To do so, scientists once again use the transit method, this time to detect the transmission spectra of light passing through the exoplanets’ atmospheres, taking measurements as each one passes in front of its home star. The light wavelengths making up the spectra correspond with different molecules present in the atmosphere. Since these spectra are born from starlight, the star’s behavior can influence the spectra at any given time. Brightness variations from the star—for example, from stars that do not behave uniformly or solar flares providing a burst of unusually high energy—can contaminate the spectrum and ultimately mask or mimic features measured from a planet’s atmosphere. Researchers studying the atmospheric conditions of exoplanets must take this variability into account.
To address this known challenge, Lawrence Livermore and NASA have partnered on a first-of-its kind mission called Pandora, launched on January 11, 2026. Pandora uses a small satellite to disentangle the star and planet signals in transmission spectroscopy by taking measurements in two regions: visible and infrared.
The Pandora mission’s chief goal is to detect the presence of water or hydrogen in a sample of 20 exoplanets, and it has already collected compelling long dwells and multiple captures of each planet. Pandora is one of several NASA Pioneers missions, a new astrophysics mission class within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. “The goal of the Pioneers Program is to create a new class of missions that were sufficiently resourced but had a higher risk tolerance, shorter time frames, and fixed budgetary constraints,” says Jordan Karburn, a Livermore staff engineer and the deputy project manager for the NASA Pandora mission. “The missions are asking how much science can be achieved most cost effectively. Pandora is part of the first class of Pioneers missions that is seeking to push the bounds of spacecraft capability.” Elisa Quintana, the principal investigator of Pandora at NASA, adds, “Pandora is the first mission in NASA’s new Pioneers Program to reach orbit and is on track to deliver a unique data set that will allow us to probe the atmospheres of distant worlds. NASA’s partnership with Lawrence Livermore has been key to our success.”
Probing Planets
Pandora will undergo just one year of data collection to identify the components of its 20 target exoplanets, which were chosen to maximize the data’s quality and quantity. The selected exoplanets are large enough to emit a robust atmospheric signal. They also have short years and will transit in front of their home stars at least 10 times during the single Earth-year period of collection, providing sufficient transmission signals to study. They are representative of the large variety present among exoplanets in both atmospheric and physical makeup.
To gather this data, Pandora features a novel all-aluminum telescope and both visible and near-infrared cameras, which will measure the transmission spectra generated each time the exoplanets transit in front of their host stars. Different molecules that are present in the atmosphere will absorb light at distinct wavelengths and leave their own fingerprint in the spectrum. In addition to molecules, Pandora will be able to probe climate, pressure, temperature, and more—data that can provide insight on stellar contamination. Until this mission, a solution to the stellar contamination found in exoplanet data was missing. “We’re primarily looking at starlight, which, under standard assumptions, is a well-behaved, constant source of light,” says Peter McGill, a Livermore staff scientist and science team contributor for Pandora. “In reality, however, that assumption is inaccurate. Just as we see in our Sun, star spots, flares, and other inhomogeneities exist, and these become mixed up and interfere with the signature of the transmission spectrum that we’re trying to extract.”
Crucially, Pandora’s observations in both visible and infrared wavelengths enable scientists to distinguish between the signal of light directly from the star and light passing through a planet’s atmosphere. Other missions, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), take short-duration infrared measurements, so by taking longer measurements in both regions, Pandora will complement existing data and help researchers determine the atmospheric signatures of these planets with greater confidence.
Prelaunch models validated that Pandora can take the necessary measurements—in particular, accurately measuring water abundance for water-rich planets—and also bolster JWST data. “We expect an improvement in existing JWST data by a factor of about two when combining it with Pandora’s data,” says Yoav Rotman, a former Livermore student intern for Pandora and current science team contributor and doctoral student at Arizona State University.
Engineered for Efficiency
In the true spirit of the Pioneers mission class, Pandora aims to provide results within a previously unachievable budget and time frame by adopting a low-cost, high-risk, and speed- forward philosophy. The entire mission cost $20 million—less than half of NASA’s $50 million expectation—and will collect data over just one year. Such fast and furious missions offer opportunities to pursue “risky” questions that may or may not yield results with less risk of spending extra time, money, and effort to do so. Simultaneously, completing more missions at a lower cost provides opportunities to train early-career scientists and engineers such as Rotman and Karburn.
Achieving this low-cost satellite package required an unconventional approach. The team sought to make both the bus—the spacecraft enabling the satellite to get into space and operate properly—and the payload—the telescope and cameras that collect the data—as inexpensive as possible, which meant sourcing them commercially. “In a way that is disruptive to the paradigm, Pandora operated on a philosophy of ‘buy what we can, and build what we must,’” says Karburn. “We pushed the boundary of buying what we could. Pandora strove for a bottoms-up approach, taking existing technologies and capabilities and integrating them into a unique configuration that could provide high-impact scientific data.”
From the beginning of Pandora’s ideation, the team focused on a commercially available spacecraft manufactured by partner Blue Canyon Technologies. The Saturn-200 minisatellite platform suited Pandora with no necessary mission-specific design modifications to the power, control, or communication systems. “Our ability to make a truly ‘off-the-shelf’ purchase is remarkable for NASA missions, and was key in keeping the spacecraft costs down,” says Karburn.
A primary instrument is a CODA telescope that Livermore had been designing with Corning Specialty Materials several years before Pandora began. CODA is predominantly aluminum in both optical surface and optomechanical structure, and the telescope is highly manufacturable and an inexpensive addition to the Pandora payload. The CODA telescope provides a common optical front end—the Cassegrain telescope— with a reconfigurable relay assembly that can be easily tuned for mission-specific requirements. Pandora took the existing designed-and-qualified Cassegrain optics and limited modifications to the relay assembly. This action greatly reduced the overall complexity of the design task. Though not designed with precision for Pandora specifically, CODA was well-suited for a higher-risk and lower-cost mission.
Finally, Pandora’s two cameras capture the mission’s visible and infrared regions of focus in the electromagnetic spectrum. The camera for recording visible light was an off-the-shelf product that Livermore engineers retrofitted to manage the thermal and mechanical loads of a space mission, enabling further cost savings. Pandora’s infrared camera had to be customized and was built by leveraging Livermore’s previous design experience with infrared spectrometers for the remote sensing group in the Laboratory’s Global Security Principal Directorate. In another spark of ingenuity, the team used its expertise in mechanical systems to build the instrument around a spare JWST sensor. “The Pandora project was achieved through close collaboration, and we delivered the satellite on budget,” says Karburn. “Building the mission around existing capabilities from our industry partners was foundational to realizing Pandora’s aggressive cost target.”
Following Pandora’s successful launch in January 2026, the mission spent a month of commissioning, including camera calibration and alignment as well as other operational steps. The satellite is midway through its scheduled year of data collection, operated by collaborators at the University of Arizona. The team eagerly awaits first results so it can begin untangling the mysteries of the exoplanets in Pandora’s sights.
Opening Pandora’s Box
Made possible by strong collaborations, Pandora is truly first of its kind and will provide a wealth of information at a comparatively low cost. The resulting data will contain answers about individual exoplanet atmospheres and also phenomena across the population of planets, according to Rotman.
In fact, Pandora has many other science working groups across institutions ready to study the results, expanding beyond exoplanets to auxiliary science and other programs. The mission’s auxiliary science group will work alongside the core mission of stellar contamination in exoplanet data. Since Pandora will only be observing transits of its target exoplanets in front of their stars, about 30 percent of its time will not be spent on the main targets. “Much more compelling science can be done with such a capable instrument,” says Karburn. Adds Rotman, “Many folks on the science team are chomping at the bit to receive the data. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to see, but we know what we’re looking for.”
—Lilly Ackerman
For further information contact Jordan Karburn (925) 422-6364 (karlburn1 [at] llnl.gov (karlburn1[at]llnl[dot]gov)).
