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[Music throughout]

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Meet Pandora, NASA’s newest exoplanet explorer.

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It will peer into the atmospheres of
planets orbiting distant stars.

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Astronomers can use events called transits to learn what
chemicals – like water – are in the planets’ atmospheres.

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When a planet passes across the face of its star ...

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... some of the star’s light interacts with the
atmosphere before heading to us.

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Telescopes can detect the chemical fingerprints
of that interaction.

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But the light is from the whole star, and star
surfaces are complicated and ever-changing.

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Such stellar changes can mask the
planet’s chemical signals.

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Pandora will address this problem by capturing
the star’s visible light and infrared spectrum

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as well as the planet’s infrared spectrum ...

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... at the same time.

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Pandora will study at least 20 known
planets during its first year,

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laying the foundation for future studies
of potentially habitable worlds.

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NASA