How NASA's Pandora Satellite Is Reading the Atmospheres of Alien Worlds

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
<v Speaker 1>with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
<v Speaker 1>gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
<v Speaker 1>unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
<v Speaker 1>of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
<v Speaker 1>slumber under the night sky.
<v Speaker 2>Welcome back. Today, we are taking a deep dive into well,
<v Speaker 2>one of the most explosive fields in all of science.
<v Speaker 2>I'm talking about exoplanets.
<v Speaker 3>It really is incredible to think about.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, just thirty years ago, if you think back,
<v Speaker 2>we weren't even sure if there was a single planet
<v Speaker 2>out there outside our own little Solar system.
<v Speaker 3>It was all just theory, purely theoretical. And now, I mean,
<v Speaker 3>the pace of discovery since that first confirmation back in
<v Speaker 3>ninety two has just been exponential. It's almost hard to
<v Speaker 3>keep up.
<v Speaker 2>So what's the count? Now? Where do we stand?
<v Speaker 3>The official catalog, The list of confirmed worlds is now
<v Speaker 3>over six thousand, six thousand, six thousand separate planets that
<v Speaker 3>we know for a fact are orbiting other stars. And
<v Speaker 3>that's just in our little corner of the Milky Way.
<v Speaker 2>That number is just it's staggering. But as we always
<v Speaker 2>talk about on here, finding them is really just step one,
<v Speaker 2>isn't it. The real challenge is figuring out.
<v Speaker 3>What they are exactly, what are they made of? Do
<v Speaker 3>they have an atmosphere? And if so, what's in that atmosphere?
<v Speaker 3>That's the holy grail.
<v Speaker 2>And that's why today we're focusing on this small but
<v Speaker 2>honestly incredibly clever mission that's designed to solve the single
<v Speaker 2>biggest problem we have in answering those questions. We're talking
<v Speaker 2>about the Pandora small set.
<v Speaker 3>Right and Pandora's in the news right now because it's
<v Speaker 3>just hit a huge milestone. It's cleared its final checks,
<v Speaker 3>it's ready to go.
<v Speaker 2>It's basically sitting on the launch pad it is, and
<v Speaker 2>the team lead, Daniel Lapie says, it's about to open
<v Speaker 2>a and I'm quoting here a new chapter in exoplanet science.
<v Speaker 2>And what's so interesting is that new chapter isn't about
<v Speaker 2>finding planet numbers six thousand and one.
<v Speaker 3>Not at all. It's designed to do something much more
<v Speaker 3>subtle and frankly, much more important. It's designed to fix
<v Speaker 3>a really messy problem with the data we already have.
<v Speaker 3>It's basically a cosmic data cleaner.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, So let's get right into the nuts and bolts
<v Speaker 2>of this mission. Because you said it's imminent, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>how soon are we talking?
<v Speaker 3>We are talking days. The satellite itself, which is wonderfully
<v Speaker 3>described as being about the size of a refrigerator.
<v Speaker 2>A household fridge. I love that.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, just a normal fridge. And that fridge has been
<v Speaker 3>mounted inside a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket. The hardware is ready.
<v Speaker 2>Okay. So for anyone listening who wants to follow along,
<v Speaker 2>when is this happening?
<v Speaker 3>The launch window opens this Sunday, January eleventh. It's going
<v Speaker 3>up from Space Launch Complex four E at Vanderberg's Space
<v Speaker 3>Force Base out in California.
<v Speaker 2>And what time?
<v Speaker 3>It's an early one. They're targeting six nineteen am Arizona time,
<v Speaker 3>which for folks on the East Coast is eight nineteen am.
<v Speaker 2>And I assume we can watch this live.
<v Speaker 3>Oh absolutely, SpaceX will be live streaming the whole thing,
<v Speaker 3>so you can watch this fridge sized satellite begin its journey.
<v Speaker 2>So that's our mission for the steep dive. A small
<v Speaker 2>satellite born out of a university project hitching a ride
<v Speaker 2>on a massive rocket all to decode the air on
<v Speaker 2>alien worlds hundreds of light years away. We need to
<v Speaker 2>understand how it works, why we so desperately need it,
<v Speaker 2>and how it's sort of the missing link between just
<v Speaker 2>counting planets and actually understanding them.
<v Speaker 3>That's it. It takes us from quantity to quality.
<v Speaker 2>So to really get what makes Pandora special, we have
<v Speaker 2>to start with its official title. It's a small SAT
<v Speaker 2>and it was chosen for this NASA program called the
<v Speaker 2>Astrophysics Pioneers.
<v Speaker 3>Right back in twenty twenty one.
<v Speaker 2>So when we think of NASA, we think of these huge,
<v Speaker 2>multi billion dollar, decade long projects like the James Web.
<v Speaker 2>What does being a pioneer mission actually mean.
<v Speaker 3>It's a really different philosophy. The whole point of the
<v Speaker 3>Planier's program is to be fast and focused or you know,
<v Speaker 3>they're much quicker to get from the drawing board to the.
<v Speaker 2>Launch pad, so a few years and not a few decades.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly, and they have strict cost caps, so they're a
<v Speaker 3>fraction of the price of a big flagship mission. The
<v Speaker 3>whole idea is to let NASA address these exciting new
<v Speaker 3>science questions that pop up without having to wait for
<v Speaker 3>a ten year planning cycle.
<v Speaker 2>It's like NASA's rapid response team. A specific urgent problem
<v Speaker 2>comes up and they can green light a smaller, more
<v Speaker 2>nimble mission to go solve it.
<v Speaker 3>That's a perfect description and Pandora is the perfect fit
<v Speaker 3>for that model because this problem at solving getting clean
<v Speaker 3>atmospheric data has only recently become the number one roadblock.
<v Speaker 3>Why now, Well, because missions like Kepler and Tess gave
<v Speaker 3>us this massive flood of planets, something that we had
<v Speaker 3>thousands of targets, but we realized the data we were
<v Speaker 3>getting from their atmospheres was well, it was contaminated, it
<v Speaker 3>was messy, and that's an emerging science question that needed
<v Speaker 3>a fast answer.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so once this fast paced small sat gets into orbit,
<v Speaker 2>what's its actual to do list. It's not hunting for
<v Speaker 2>new planets, so what is it doing.
<v Speaker 3>Its job is purely characterization calibration. Really, the plan is
<v Speaker 3>to do a very deep, very dedicated study of at
<v Speaker 3>least twenty known exoplanets.
<v Speaker 2>It's super targeted and it's looking for what specifically the.
<v Speaker 3>Big three ingredients for an atmosphere. It's looking for signs
<v Speaker 3>of hazes, clouds, and the big one.
<v Speaker 2>Water vapor It's funny if you think about the James
<v Speaker 2>Web Space Telescope as this giant all seeing eye that
<v Speaker 2>can look at anything in the universe.
<v Speaker 3>The ultimate multi toool.
<v Speaker 2>Right, then Pandora is more like a specialized surgical instrument.
<v Speaker 2>It's built to do one thing over and over with
<v Speaker 2>obsessive precision.
<v Speaker 3>That is the perfect analogy. Yeah, and the hardware shows it.
<v Speaker 3>Even though it's just the size of a fridge. They
<v Speaker 3>call it keen eyed because every part of his design
<v Speaker 3>is about accuracy and stability.
<v Speaker 2>So what's inside. What's the instrument.
<v Speaker 3>It's a telescope with an eighteen inch mirror that's about
<v Speaker 3>forty five centimeters and for a small SAT, that's a
<v Speaker 3>pretty serious piece of glass. It can gather a good
<v Speaker 3>amount of light from these pretty faint distant stars.
<v Speaker 2>But it's not just taking pictures, right, That mirror is
<v Speaker 2>feeding the light into some very specific instruments. We need
<v Speaker 2>to talk about the two kinds of data it's collecting
<v Speaker 2>at the same time.
<v Speaker 3>Absolutely, the whole package is designed and the mission states
<v Speaker 3>this an extreme level of accuracy. So first up is
<v Speaker 3>the light spectra, the rainbow of light. Exactly when a
<v Speaker 3>planet passes in front of its star. The starlight filters
<v Speaker 3>through the planet's atmosphere, and the atoms and molecules in
<v Speaker 3>that atmosphere, like say water, they absorb very specific colors,
<v Speaker 3>very specific wavelengths of that light.
<v Speaker 2>So you get these tiny little dark lines in the
<v Speaker 2>rainbow like a barcode.
<v Speaker 3>A chemical barcode, or a fingerprint. It's perfect. Pandora's instruments
<v Speaker 3>can read that barcode in incredible detail, and crucially, it's
<v Speaker 3>getting the fingerprint of the planet's atmosphere and the star
<v Speaker 3>itself simultaneously.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, that's data type one, the chemical fingerprint. What's the second.
<v Speaker 3>The second is the good old fashioned brightness measurement. This
<v Speaker 3>is the transit method one oh one. As the planet
<v Speaker 3>crosses in front of the star, it blocks a tiny
<v Speaker 3>bit of light, causing a little dip in the star's brightness.
<v Speaker 2>And Pandora measures that dip with souper high precision.
<v Speaker 3>With incredible precision. That tells you the planet is there
<v Speaker 3>and how big it is. But the magic happens when
<v Speaker 3>you combine that precise brightness measurement with the chemical fingerprint
<v Speaker 3>from the spectra, both taken at the exact same time
<v Speaker 3>with the same stable instrument that's the key to everything
<v Speaker 3>Pandora does.
<v Speaker 2>This all sounds very methodical. It doesn't sound like a
<v Speaker 2>quick look survey. What's the actual observation plan? How long
<v Speaker 2>does it spend on each target?
<v Speaker 3>Oh, it's incredibly patient. It has to be because the
<v Speaker 3>signal it's looking for is just so faint. So after
<v Speaker 3>it launches, it'll spend about a month on commissioning, you know,
<v Speaker 3>warming up, checking.
<v Speaker 2>All the systems, candid procedure.
<v Speaker 3>Right then it begins its one year prime mission, and
<v Speaker 3>for each of its twenty targets, it is programmed to
<v Speaker 3>just stare. It will lock onto a star system and
<v Speaker 3>observe it continuously for a full twenty four hours.
<v Speaker 2>A whole day for one start. That seems like a
<v Speaker 2>really long time for a satellite. Why so long? Why
<v Speaker 2>not just catch the transit which might only last a
<v Speaker 2>couple of hours.
<v Speaker 3>That long stare is essential for fighting the noise. You
<v Speaker 3>have to remember these stars are dozens, even hundreds of
<v Speaker 3>light years away. The signal, that little atmospheric fingerprint is
<v Speaker 3>ridiculously faint, So by staring for twenty four hours you
<v Speaker 3>build up the signal. You can average out all the
<v Speaker 3>random instrumental jitters and flickers.
<v Speaker 2>You improve the signal to noise ratio.
<v Speaker 3>Dramatically plus and this is critical for what we're about
<v Speaker 3>to discuss.
<v Speaker 2>It.
<v Speaker 3>Lets you watch the star itself rotate, you can map
<v Speaker 3>its surface, You get the full context, not just a snapshot.
<v Speaker 2>And it does this multiple times per target.
<v Speaker 3>It does to make sure that data is rock solid.
<v Speaker 3>It will repeat that twenty four hour stare ten separate
<v Speaker 3>times for each of the twenty systems over its one
<v Speaker 3>year missions, ten times ten times. That repetition gives them
<v Speaker 3>the statistical power they need to be certain. It's the
<v Speaker 3>only way to defeat the main problem they're trying to solve,
<v Speaker 3>this thing called stellar contamination.
<v Speaker 2>Let's get right into that, the stellar contamination problem. For
<v Speaker 2>someone listening who's really into this stuff, the basic idea
<v Speaker 2>of looking at light through an atmosphere seems so clean
<v Speaker 2>and eleg The planet crosses the star light filters through
<v Speaker 2>you read the barcode, simple, Why is it so much harder?
<v Speaker 2>In reality?
<v Speaker 3>The problem isn't the planet. The problem is the star.
<v Speaker 3>The light source is flawed. And this is a really
<v Speaker 3>fascinating and counterintuitive part of astronomy. How So, for a
<v Speaker 3>long time, the working assumption in these transit measurements was
<v Speaker 3>that the star was well a constant, a perfect, steady,
<v Speaker 3>uniform light source.
<v Speaker 2>The ultimate reference point, a perfect light bulb in the distance.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly a clean backdrop. But we know now that is
<v Speaker 3>completely wrong. Stars are not these immaculate, shiny objects. They
<v Speaker 3>are churning, roiling balls of superheated plasma, active, incredibly active.
<v Speaker 3>Their surfaces are covered with features. They have star spots,
<v Speaker 3>which are like our sun spot's cooler darker patches caused
<v Speaker 3>by intense magnetic fields, and they have the opposite too, brighter,
<v Speaker 3>hotter regions called faculate. The entire surface is a shifting,
<v Speaker 3>modeled pattern of bright and dark patches.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, I think I see where this is going. So
<v Speaker 2>when a tiny little planet crosses in front of that star,
<v Speaker 2>it might pass over a nice clean, bright part, or
<v Speaker 2>it might pass right over a big dark star spot.
<v Speaker 3>And that changes everything. That is the absolute core of
<v Speaker 3>what Daniel Lapie calls the stellar contamination problem.
<v Speaker 2>How does that mess up the measurements so badly?
<v Speaker 3>Think about it. We're trying to measure the tiny dip
<v Speaker 3>in light caused by the planet if the planet passes
<v Speaker 3>over a dark spot it's blocking an area that was
<v Speaker 3>already dimmer than the rest of the star. So the
<v Speaker 3>dip until light you measure is smaller than it should be.
<v Speaker 3>Your measurement of the planet's size is wrong. And worse,
<v Speaker 3>the spectrum of light coming through is wrong. The light
<v Speaker 3>from a cool dark spot is redder, the light from
<v Speaker 3>a hot bright patch is bluer. This messiness, this contamination
<v Speaker 3>from the star's own splotchy surface, makes the atmospheric data
<v Speaker 3>totally unreliable.
<v Speaker 2>That's a huge problem. We're using the stars light as
<v Speaker 2>our baseline, our reference, but if the reference itself is
<v Speaker 2>constantly changed and flickering, how can you possibly isolate the
<v Speaker 2>tiny signal from the planet's atmosphere.
<v Speaker 3>You can't, not reliably. It means you might be seeing
<v Speaker 3>a dip in the spectrum and thinking, Aha, that's water.
<v Speaker 2>Vapor, when really it's just the signature of a cool
<v Speaker 2>star spot that was behind the planet during the transit.
<v Speaker 3>Precisely, we were misattributing the star's noise to the planet's signal.
<v Speaker 3>As the data from Kepler piled up, scientists started realizing this.
<v Speaker 3>A pie said, and this is a direct quote. If
<v Speaker 3>you don't properly account for this stellar noise. All bets
<v Speaker 3>are off when you make claims about a planet's atmosphere.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, I have to push back a little here. Surely
<v Speaker 2>this is a known problem. I mean, with an instrument
<v Speaker 2>as powerful as the James Web Space Telescope, can't you
<v Speaker 2>just model the star's activity and subtract it out mathematically.
<v Speaker 3>That is a great question, and yes you can try
<v Speaker 3>to model it, but a model is only as good
<v Speaker 3>as the data you.
<v Speaker 2>Feed it, and JWST doesn't have that data.
<v Speaker 3>Not in the way it needs it. The source material
<v Speaker 3>is very clear that this stellar contamination problem absolutely lee
<v Speaker 3>effects JWST data web has this unbelievable power to collect
<v Speaker 3>light and see faint spectral lines, but it's usually just
<v Speaker 3>taking a snapshot during the transit. It doesn't have the continuous,
<v Speaker 3>multicolor context of what the entire star was doing at
<v Speaker 3>that exact moment.
<v Speaker 2>So JWST can see the result the final combined light,
<v Speaker 2>but it can't easily tell which part of that signal
<v Speaker 2>came from the planet and which part came from the
<v Speaker 2>star's surface.
<v Speaker 3>You've nailed it. It can't disentangle the two signals. And
<v Speaker 3>this is where Pandora becomes the hero of the story.
<v Speaker 3>It is the very first space telescope designed from the
<v Speaker 3>ground up to solve this one specific problem, the first one,
<v Speaker 3>the first one, APIs says, it's the first mission really
<v Speaker 3>designed to study the stars and their planets together. It's
<v Speaker 3>not just looking at the planet, it's simultaneously creating a
<v Speaker 3>detailed multicolor map of the star's MESSI face.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, let's break down that multicolor aspect, because that seems
<v Speaker 2>to be the secret sauce here, How does looking at
<v Speaker 2>the star in different colors solve the problem?
<v Speaker 3>This is the really clever bit. Different stellar features, spots, faculae,
<v Speaker 3>they look different in different wavelengths or colors of light.
<v Speaker 3>A cool dark star spot, for example, blocks a lot
<v Speaker 3>of visible light, making it look dark to our.
<v Speaker 2>Eyes, but it might look different in another color of light.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly that same cool spot still glows brightly in infrared light. Meanwhile,
<v Speaker 3>the thing we're looking for, water vapor, has its strongest
<v Speaker 3>clearest absorption barcode in the near infrared.
<v Speaker 2>Ah, I get it now. It's a process of elimination.
<v Speaker 3>It's a differential measurement. If Pandora sees a dip in
<v Speaker 3>the visible light from the star system, but sees no
<v Speaker 3>change in the infrared light where the water signature should be.
<v Speaker 2>Then you know the dip was caused by a star spot,
<v Speaker 2>not by water in the planet's atmosphere.
<v Speaker 3>Precisely, by measuring everything at the exact same time across
<v Speaker 3>multiple color channels, you can mathematically separate the two signals.
<v Speaker 3>You can say, Okay, this much of the change was
<v Speaker 3>the star being messy. Let's subtract that out, and this
<v Speaker 3>little bit left over that's the real signal from the
<v Speaker 3>place in its atmosphere.
<v Speaker 2>It's like having two equations to solve for two unknown variables.
<v Speaker 2>Without Pandora, you only have one equation, So the answer
<v Speaker 2>is ambiguous.
<v Speaker 3>That's it. It removes the ambiguity. It's not just a telescope,
<v Speaker 3>it's a diagnostic tool. It lets us finally trust the
<v Speaker 3>atmospheric data we're collecting, which is the only way we
<v Speaker 3>can move forward.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so let's place Pandora in the grand scheme of things.
<v Speaker 2>We've established it as this ultimate filter for MESSI starlight.
<v Speaker 2>How does a fridge sized satellite play with the giants
<v Speaker 2>of the field like Kepler and of course JWST.
<v Speaker 3>It's not a competitor. It's a collaborator. It's maybe the
<v Speaker 3>most important collaborator they could have. Pandora is a contact setter,
<v Speaker 3>it's a calibrator. It provides that missing piece of information
<v Speaker 3>that makes the data from those other missions more valuable.
<v Speaker 2>So let's start with Kepler. Kepler was the mission that
<v Speaker 2>gave us thousands of those planets in the first place.
<v Speaker 2>How does Pandora help a mission that's.
<v Speaker 3>Already over it retroactively improves its legacy. Kepler was brilliant
<v Speaker 3>at finding planets. It was just looking for that simple
<v Speaker 3>dip and brightness. But it didn't have the tools to
<v Speaker 3>deal with this stellar contamination problem we've been talking about.
<v Speaker 2>So a lot of the Kepler worlds that we thought
<v Speaker 2>might have interesting atmospheres that data is suspect it is.
<v Speaker 3>So Pandora's target list includes some of these well known
<v Speaker 3>Kepler planets. By going back and staring at them with
<v Speaker 3>its specialized instruments, Pandora will provide the first ever clean
<v Speaker 3>atmospheric data for those systems. It lets us finally interpret
<v Speaker 3>Kepler's amazing discoveries with confidence.
<v Speaker 2>That's incredible. It's like an update patch for a past mission.
<v Speaker 2>And then there's the big one, the synergy with JWST.
<v Speaker 2>Why does the most powerful telescope ever built need help
<v Speaker 2>from a small set.
<v Speaker 3>This is maybe the number one reason Pandora got funded.
<v Speaker 3>Web's instruments are just breathtakingly sensitive, especially in the infrared
<v Speaker 3>where water signatures are.
<v Speaker 2>But the star is still messy.
<v Speaker 3>The star is still messy. If Web observes a planet
<v Speaker 3>around a very active red dwarf star, which are prime targets,
<v Speaker 3>and that star pops off a flare or has a
<v Speaker 3>huge spot rotated to view, Web's beautiful high resolution data
<v Speaker 3>is still contaminated.
<v Speaker 2>So let me see if I have this right. JAWST
<v Speaker 2>gives us the raw, super detailed spectrum. It can see
<v Speaker 2>the depth and shape of those absorption lines like nothing.
<v Speaker 3>Else, unparalleled power.
<v Speaker 2>But Pandora provides the correction factor. It's the key that
<v Speaker 2>tells scientists, Okay, from that beautiful JWST data, you need
<v Speaker 2>to subtract the specific amount of noise that we measured
<v Speaker 2>from the star's activity, and what's left is the true atmosphere.
<v Speaker 3>You've got it. It's a force multipliyer for Web. It
<v Speaker 3>makes Web's data more powerful by making it more certain.
<v Speaker 3>The two missions together can do what neither could do alone.
<v Speaker 3>Pandora provides the clean stellar context and Web provides the
<v Speaker 3>deep atmospheric detail.
<v Speaker 2>So the immediate goal here isn't to find life, is it?
<v Speaker 3>No, not at all. The team is very clear about that.
<v Speaker 3>The mission is to find the foundational ingredients, is their water, vapor,
<v Speaker 3>and to perfectly characterize the host stars. You have to
<v Speaker 3>learn to walk before you can run. We have to
<v Speaker 3>be able to reliably measure the basics before we can
<v Speaker 3>ever hope to find complex biosignatures. Pandora is teaching us
<v Speaker 3>how to walk.
<v Speaker 2>Let's shift from orbit down to the ground. This mission
<v Speaker 2>is led by the University of Arizona the u of A.
<v Speaker 2>This isn't just a science project for them. They're actually
<v Speaker 2>flying the satellite. Where is mission control?
<v Speaker 3>It's all in house for them. The entire mission is
<v Speaker 3>being managed from the u of a's Multi Mission Operation Center,
<v Speaker 3>or MMOC. It's located right there on campus in Tucson
<v Speaker 3>in the Advanced Research Building.
<v Speaker 2>That's a huge responsibility for university. What does that actually
<v Speaker 2>entail on a day to day basis? It's not just
<v Speaker 2>downloading pictures, I assume, Oh no, it's full.
<v Speaker 3>On mission control. They are responsible for everything. They plan
<v Speaker 3>and upload all the command sequences, telling Pandora which start
<v Speaker 3>to look at for how long.
<v Speaker 2>So they're managing those twenty four hour stairs they.
<v Speaker 3>Are, They're tracking the spacecraft's orbit in real time. They're
<v Speaker 3>receiving all the science data and just as importantly, all the.
<v Speaker 2>Telemetry, telemetry being the spacecraft's health data.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly is it too hot, too cold, or the power
<v Speaker 3>levels good? And they're actively managing the spacecraft's health, especially
<v Speaker 3>its thermal stability.
<v Speaker 2>Right, you mentioned stability is key. Why is keeping a
<v Speaker 2>telescope at the right temperature so critical for this specific mission.
<v Speaker 3>Because tiny changes in temperature create noise. The signals Pandora
<v Speaker 3>is measuring are dips in light of just a few
<v Speaker 3>parts per million. If the telescope's mirror expands or contracts
<v Speaker 3>by even a microscopic amount because of a temperature change,
<v Speaker 3>it throws the whole measurement off.
<v Speaker 2>So the team in Tucson has to constantly adjust things
<v Speaker 2>to keep it perfectly stable.
<v Speaker 3>Constantly they have to keep it in a state of
<v Speaker 3>thermal equilibrium for that entire twenty four hour observation. That's
<v Speaker 3>the only way they can be sure that the signal
<v Speaker 3>they're seeing is from a planet hundreds of light years away,
<v Speaker 3>and not just from their own instrument warming up.
<v Speaker 2>This sounds incredibly complex. Does the U of A have
<v Speaker 2>a track record with this kind of thing?
<v Speaker 3>They have a stellar track record, you could say. The
<v Speaker 3>director of the Space Institute, Erica Hamden, pointed out that
<v Speaker 3>this is a continuation or really strong legacy.
<v Speaker 2>What other missions have they run?
<v Speaker 3>Two really famous and really complex ones. Yeah, they operated
<v Speaker 3>the Phoenix Mars Lander, the.
<v Speaker 2>One that dug into the ice on Mars.
<v Speaker 3>That's the one. And even more recently and maybe more complexly,
<v Speaker 3>they ran the Osiris REX Asteroid sample return mission.
<v Speaker 2>Wow, Osiris REX just brought its sample back to Earth
<v Speaker 2>last year. That was one of the most complicated robotic
<v Speaker 2>missions ever attempted.
<v Speaker 3>It really was. You're talking about navigating to a tiny asteroid,
<v Speaker 3>touching down, grabbing a sample, and flying it all the
<v Speaker 3>way back home. The fact that the U OFA managed
<v Speaker 3>missions of that caliber proves they have the expertise in
<v Speaker 3>the infrastructure to handle something like Candora. They've earned it.
<v Speaker 2>There's another thing I loved in the source material, which
<v Speaker 2>was the structure of the team itself.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, this is a really great aspect of the Pioneers program.
<v Speaker 2>It's not just the seasoned veterans running the show, not
<v Speaker 2>at all.
<v Speaker 3>It's a key part of the mission's philosophy, and half
<v Speaker 3>of the leadership roles on Pandora are filled by early
<v Speaker 3>career scientists and engineers. It's designed to be a training ground.
<v Speaker 2>That's fantastic. So the people who are going to be
<v Speaker 2>leading the big flagship missions in the twenty thirties and
<v Speaker 2>twenty forties, the ones that will be hunting for life.
<v Speaker 3>Are getting their hands on mission control experience right now
<v Speaker 3>flying a real orbiting observatory. It's an investment in the
<v Speaker 3>next generation.
<v Speaker 2>And finally, this mission is all about creating a reliable
<v Speaker 2>foundational data set. Does that data stay with the team
<v Speaker 2>or is it shared?
<v Speaker 3>Oh, it's shared. That's a core principle here. All the
<v Speaker 3>data Pandora collects, the clean spectra, the stellar noise maps,
<v Speaker 3>everything for these twenty systems. It will all be made
<v Speaker 3>publicly available.
<v Speaker 2>So any researcher in the world can use it anyone.
<v Speaker 3>It allows scientists everywhere to use this data to calibrate
<v Speaker 3>their own observations, whether they're using a telescope on the
<v Speaker 3>ground or reanalyzing old Kepler data or trying to clean
<v Speaker 3>up new JWOST results. It's an open source solution to
<v Speaker 3>a community wide problem.
<v Speaker 2>So we're at the end of our deep dive. Pandora
<v Speaker 2>is on the verge of its launch. Let's try to
<v Speaker 2>pull this all together for the person listening who's just
<v Speaker 2>captivated by this search for life. Why is this one unassuming,
<v Speaker 2>fridge sized satellite so important.
<v Speaker 3>It's important because it's about the quality of our knowledge.
<v Speaker 3>For years, we've been in the census era, just counting
<v Speaker 3>planets six thousand plus. Pandora moves us into the characterization.
<v Speaker 2>Era, from counting to understanding exactly.
<v Speaker 3>It's the filter that lets us accurately read the chemical
<v Speaker 3>story told by a planet's atmosphere by finally removing the
<v Speaker 3>interference the noise from its own parent star.
<v Speaker 2>That stellar noise problem really is the heart of it,
<v Speaker 2>the idea that stars are these messy, chaotic things, and
<v Speaker 2>that chaos was scrambling the tiny, faint signal from the planet.
<v Speaker 3>It was in Pandora's job, it's one and only job,
<v Speaker 3>is to map that chaos in multiple colors at once,
<v Speaker 3>so that we can isolate the true signal of the planet.
<v Speaker 2>Without that, any claims about finding water or anything else
<v Speaker 2>were just built on a shaky foundation.
<v Speaker 3>It's extremely shaky. Pandora provides the bedrock. It provides the
<v Speaker 3>certainty we need so that when we use a powerful
<v Speaker 3>tool like JWST, we can trust the results. I think
<v Speaker 3>Tomas Dias de la Rubia from the UFA said it best.
<v Speaker 3>He said, we're on the cusp of a new era
<v Speaker 3>in which we will, for the first time peered deeply
<v Speaker 3>into the atmospheres of distant worlds.
<v Speaker 2>That's a powerful statement, and it really speaks to the
<v Speaker 2>need for this kind of methodical foundational science. It's not
<v Speaker 2>always about the big, flashy discovery.
<v Speaker 3>No, Sometimes the biggest breakthrough has come from fixing a
<v Speaker 3>fundamental problem in your measurement technique. The leap from knowing
<v Speaker 3>about six thousand planets to truly understanding the atmospheres of
<v Speaker 3>twenty of them, that is a massive, massive step forward.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so let's leave our listeners with that final provocative
<v Speaker 2>thought to chew on. Where does this all lead?
<v Speaker 3>All right? Consider this the ultimate goal. The thing we
<v Speaker 3>all want to find is a biosignature, a sign of
<v Speaker 3>life like oxygen in the atmosphere. Of an exoplanet the
<v Speaker 3>ultimate discovery, right, And we now know of more more
<v Speaker 3>than six thousand potential targets. And here we are investing
<v Speaker 3>all this time, money, and incredible engineering talent into a
<v Speaker 3>dedicated mission just to reliably confirm the most basic component
<v Speaker 3>water vapor and to clean up the starlight.
<v Speaker 2>So here's the question for you to think about. What
<v Speaker 2>does the fact that we need a mission this sophisticated
<v Speaker 2>just to get a reliable baseline tell you about how
<v Speaker 2>confident the scientific community is that there are worlds worth
<v Speaker 2>studying out there.
<v Speaker 3>They wouldn't be building this incredibly precise filter if they
<v Speaker 3>didn't think there were amazing things waiting to be seen.
<v Speaker 3>On the other side, the investment itself is a statement
<v Speaker 3>of confidence in the abundance of planets and potentially water
<v Speaker 3>throughout the galaxy.
<v Speaker 2>And if we start from that assumption that the targets
<v Speaker 2>are plentiful, then how does Pandora, combined with the power
<v Speaker 2>of jawst, change the odds of finding a true biosignature
<v Speaker 2>in our lifetimes.
<v Speaker 3>It suggests the odds might be a lot better than
<v Speaker 3>we thought. But only if and this is the entire
<v Speaker 3>point of the mission, Only if we get the fun
<v Speaker 3>na mental measurements right first. Pandora is our tool to
<v Speaker 3>finally get them right.
<v Speaker 2>An incredible mission about to begin a new chapter. Thanks
<v Speaker 2>for taking this deep dive with us.
<v Speaker 3>It was a pleasure. I will definitely be watching that
<v Speaker 3>launch on Sunday morning.
<v Speaker 2>Sai