{"id":231558,"date":"2026-01-13T21:49:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T21:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/231558\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T21:49:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T21:49:09","slug":"nasa-deploys-orbital-telescope-designed-to-do-something-incredible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/231558\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA Deploys Orbital Telescope Designed to Do Something Incredible"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\"NASA's<\/p>\n

\t\t\tNASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center\/Conceptual Image Lab<\/p>\n

On Sunday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stuffed with cargo carried a brand new NASA telescope into space, where it was observed deploying in Sun-synchronous orbit<\/a>, the agency later confirmed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dubbed Pandora, the orbital observatory is designed to hunt for distant worlds called exoplanets orbiting other stars. And though not nearly as large or expensive as the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a>, the 17-inch lens packs a specialized punch that\u2019ll help astronomers do something that was unthinkable just a decade or two ago: glean clues from individual exoplanets too remote for even the mighty Webb to pick up on.<\/p>\n

Pandora\u2019s mission will last a year, during which it\u2019s expected to complete observations of at least 20 exoplanets \u2014 as well, in a novel development, of the stars they orbit.<\/p>\n

This will \u201cshatter a barrier,\u201d according to University of Arizona astronomer Daniel Apai, whose team helped build the telescope \u2014 helping \u201cremove a source of noise in the data that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them,\u201d he wrote in a new piece<\/a> for The Conversation.<\/p>\n

Exoplanets are incredibly difficult to find, and even harder to study. Look up into the night sky, and you will effortlessly spot millions of stars. The first exoplanet, in contrast, wasn\u2019t confirmed until 1992<\/a>; to this day, astronomers have found only around 6,000 planets around other stars, a task hindered because the little-if-any light they reflect is blown out by that of nearby stars.<\/p>\n

To espy distant worlds, astronomers look for when a planet passes in front of its star from our perspective. This is called a transit, and it produces a noticeable dip in the starlight. What\u2019s more, astronomers can analyze the light to tease out properties of the planet it passes through, like the chemicals in its atmosphere. Apai, who is also co-investigator of Pandora, compares this to holding a glass of wine up to a candle: \u201cThe light filtering through will show fine details that reveal the quality of the wine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Likewise, \u201cby analyzing starlight filtered through the planets\u2019 atmospheres,\u201d he continued, \u201castronomers can find evidence for water vapor, hydrogen, clouds and even search for evidence of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Astronomers have relied on this clever trick for decades, but recent research, some of it spearheaded by Apai and his colleagues, has shown that it can have a serious flaw. Cooler, volatile regions on the surface of stars, called starspots, can fudge the signals astronomers see, even tricking them into mistaking the water vapor around a star for being present on the planet. Essentially, \u201cwe were trying to judge our wine in light of flickering, unstable candles,\u201d Apai said.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where Pandora comes in. Being purpose-built for exoplanet hunting, it can spend far more time observing them than Webb, whose precious time is always in hot demand. Even better, Pandora will observe the stars themselves for 24 hours at a time with infrared and visible light sensors, closely monitoring how the starspots form and evolve. Over the course of its year-long mission, the telescope will revisit each star ten times, racking up hundreds of hours of observations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith that information, our Pandora team will be able to figure out how the changes in the stars affect the observed planetary transits,\u201d Apai wrote.<\/p>\n

More on exoplanets: James Webb Discovers Planet Shaped Like Lemon<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center\/Conceptual Image Lab On Sunday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stuffed with cargo carried…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-231558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}