[Music throughout]
Meet Pandora, NASA’s newest exoplanet explorer.
It will peer into the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars.
Astronomers can use events called transits to learn what chemicals – like water – are in the planets’ atmospheres.
When a planet passes across the face of its star ...
... some of the star’s light interacts with the atmosphere before heading to us.
Telescopes can detect the chemical fingerprints of that interaction.
But the light is from the whole star, and star surfaces are complicated and ever-changing.
Such stellar changes can mask the planet’s chemical signals.
Pandora will address this problem by capturing the star’s visible light and infrared spectrum
as well as the planet’s infrared spectrum ...
... at the same time.
Pandora will study at least 20 known planets during its first year,
laying the foundation for future studies of potentially habitable worlds.
NASA