On Monday, Jan. 12, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in partnership with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Blue Canyon Technologies, announced the successful launch of the Pandora satellite into Earth's orbit, initiating a yearlong mission to advance atmospheric characterization of planets beyond our solar system, also known as exoplanets.
Pandora represents a major engineering achievement, delivering a first-of-its-kind, all-aluminum telescope on a commercial off-the-shelf satellite with a schedule and budget unmatched by traditional space observatories.
Pandora is set to observe approximately 20 exoplanets and their host stars, monitoring starlight as it filters through an exoplanet's atmosphere during orbit. This technique, known as transmission spectroscopy, will allow scientists to identify atmospheric features such as hydrogen, water vapor, clouds and haze.
The long-baseline observations in visible and near-infrared wavelengths collected by the satellite will complement the shorter-duration infrared measurements from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to help researchers interpret the signals with greater confidence.
"Small satellites are great platforms to fill gaps and help maximize the science from NASA's flagship missions, like JWST," said Elisa Quintana, principal investigator for Pandora at GSFC. "Pandora will illustrate how we can leverage small platforms to tackle big scientific challenges."
The effort is part of NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers program, designed to accomplish compelling science at a lower cost compared to traditional missions, with a cost cap of $20 million. As one of four selected proposals in the program's inaugural year, the successful deployment of the Pandora SmallSat Mission on the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch is an incredible milestone for the program.
To accomplish this feat, engineers at LLNL approached the payload development inversely, beginning with a bottoms-up requirements derivation process, where the team scoped key elements of the mission around existing technologies. One of the earliest decisions was to leverage an off-the-shelf satellite bus from Blue Canyon Technologies rather than commissioning a custom-designed platform. At the time of proposal, Blue Canyon Technologies was the only vendor able to offer a commercial product that could meet the stringiest stability requirements that Pandora needed to obtain long-observations of exoplanets and their host stars.
The strategy reduced the development timeline immensely but required close partnership between the technical leadership team to meet the constraints of the commercial product. Pandora is the first NASA Astrophysics mission to purchase a commercial spacecraft bus of this size and require no mission-unique design modifications or accommodations. The team was able to fully leverage an existing, proven satellite design for the mission.
The CODA telescope, developed jointly by LLNL and Corning Incorporated, became the centerpiece of the Pandora Mission. The lightweight, all-aluminum telescope was built to challenge long-standing cost and schedule barriers in space-based optics. By standardizing its primary components and enabling rapid reconfiguration for different missions, the CODA architecture greatly reduces manufacturing complexity and time.
For Pandora, this approach allowed the team to reuse CODA's mature front-end optics and customize only the relay system, producing a high-performance, half-meter telescope. Pandora's instrument costs came in at 15% of what NASA cost models projected for an instrument of this class. These cost savings were largely made possible thanks to the revolutionary all-aluminum design of the CODA telescope.
"Pandora demonstrates that compelling, novel, science missions can be built around existing, proven technologies," said Jordan Karburn, deputy for the Pandora project. "We are extremely excited about what Pandora has shown and feel that the mission serves as an existence proof for what future small satellite science missions can accomplish."
As Pandora begins its first observations, the mission stands to deepen understanding of distant worlds while demonstrating how government and commercial partners can deliver sophisticated science more rapidly and affordably. Its success expands the pathway for future small-satellite missions, showing that high-impact astrophysics no longer depends solely on high-cost missions.
