Imagine a world where we could peer into the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars, searching for signs of life. But here's the catch: the very stars we're studying can deceive us, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between a planet's atmosphere and the star's own activity. This is the challenge NASA’s Pandora telescope aims to overcome.
On January 11, 2026, I stood with bated breath at the tightly secured Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, witnessing a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soar into the sky, carrying NASA’s groundbreaking exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit. Exoplanets—planets orbiting other stars—are notoriously difficult to observe. From Earth, they appear as faint specks of light dwarfed by their host stars, which are millions to billions of times brighter. Pandora joins the ranks of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, but with a unique mission: to unravel the mysteries of stellar activity that have long obscured our view of these distant worlds.
As an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona specializing in exoplanets and astrobiology, I’ve dedicated my career to studying planets beyond our solar system. As a co-investigator of Pandora and leader of its exoplanet science working group, I’m part of a team determined to break through a critical barrier in exoplanet research. Our goal? To eliminate the noise caused by stellar activity, which has limited our ability to study small exoplanets and search for life on them.
And this is the part most people miss: astronomers have a clever trick to study exoplanet atmospheres. By observing planets as they pass in front of their host stars—a phenomenon called a transit—we can analyze starlight filtered through their atmospheres. Think of it like holding a glass of wine up to a candle; the light reveals subtle details about the wine’s quality. Similarly, by studying filtered starlight, we can detect water vapor, hydrogen, clouds, and even potential signs of life.
This method worked remarkably well—until it didn’t. Starting in 2007, astronomers noticed that starspots—cooler, active regions on stars—could distort transit measurements. In 2018 and 2019, my colleagues Benjamin V. Rackham, Mark Giampapa, and I published studies revealing how darker starspots and brighter, magnetically active regions could mislead exoplanet observations. We called this the ‘transit light source effect.’ Most stars are spotted, active, and constantly changing, which complicates our ability to interpret exoplanet signals. To make matters worse, some stars have water vapor in their upper layers, often concentrated in starspots, which can trick astronomers into thinking they’ve detected water on a planet.
But here’s where it gets controversial: in our papers, published three years before the James Webb Space Telescope’s launch, we warned that Webb’s potential could be limited by this very issue. It’s like trying to judge a wine’s quality by candlelight when the candle keeps flickering. This realization sparked the birth of Pandora.
Pandora began with an intriguing email from NASA in 2018. Scientists Elisa Quintana and Tom Barclay proposed an audacious idea: build a space telescope quickly to address stellar contamination in time to assist Webb. While exciting, this was no small feat. Space telescopes are complex, and rushing their development is risky. Yet, Pandora defied convention. We built it faster and at a fraction of the typical cost by keeping the mission simple and accepting higher risks.
What sets Pandora apart? Unlike Webb, Pandora is smaller and collects less light, but it excels at what Webb cannot: patiently observing stars to understand how their atmospheres change. By staring at a star for 24 hours with visible and infrared cameras, Pandora measures subtle shifts in brightness and color as active regions and starspots come into view. While Webb rarely revisits the same planet or monitors host stars, Pandora will observe its target stars 10 times over a year, spending over 200 hours on each. This data will help us disentangle stellar activity from exoplanet signals, providing unprecedented insights into exoplanet atmospheres when combined with Webb’s observations.
Now orbiting Earth every 90 minutes, Pandora is undergoing rigorous testing by Blue Canyon Technologies, its primary builder. In about a week, control will shift to the University of Arizona’s Multi-Mission Operation Center in Tucson, where our science teams will begin their work in earnest. Soon, we’ll capture starlight filtered through the atmospheres of distant worlds, seeing them with a clarity never before achieved.
But here’s the question that lingers: As we peer deeper into the cosmos, will we find evidence of life beyond Earth? And if we do, how will it change our understanding of our place in the universe? Share your thoughts in the comments—let’s spark a conversation about the possibilities that lie beyond our solar system.
