SpaceX on Sunday launched NASA’s Pandora telescope on the Twilight rideshare mission. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 7:15 pm IST [9:45 am EST] from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California carrying about 40 payloads including the telescope. Apart from Pandora, NASA owns two other payloads – shoebox-sized satellites named BlackCAT (Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope) and SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) to find answers to fundamental questions like “how does the universe work?” and “are we alone?”
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/3MTtlIVlAA
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 11, 2026
In a post on X, SpaceX said – “The payloads on this mission will be deployed to a dusk-dawn Sun-synchronous orbit, meaning the spacecraft will be flying roughly along the boundary between day and night, or Twilight, where it’s always breaking dawn.”
Pandora will be deployed at an altitude of 600 kilometres where it will study the atmospheres of exoplanets – worlds outside our solar system – and their stars in visible and near-infrared light. Weighing 325 kilograms, Pandora carries a 17-inch-wide (45 centimeters) primary mirror and a near-infrared detector that was a spare developed for the James Webb Space Telescope.
Objectives of NASA’s Pandora telescope
The telescope’s objective is studying the atmosphere of exoplanets as they pass in front of their stars as seen from our perspective – an event called a transit.
When starlight passes through a planet’s atmosphere, it interacts with elements like water and oxygen. Pandora will collect this light carrying ‘fingerprints’ of a planetary atmosphere and its spectroscope will split it into different colours to determine what elements the atmosphere is composed of.
Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets in one year of its planned operations. Apart from studying the planetary atmosphere, it will also help scientists differentiate signals of water and oxygen from an alien world and a star. The surface of stars have brighter and darker regions that grow, shrink, and change position over time and some of these areas may contain the same chemicals that astronomers hope to find in the planet’s atmosphere, such as water vapour.
The telescope will look at each planet and its star 10 times, with each observation lasting a total of 24 hours.
“The long stares with both detectors are critical for tracing the exact origins of elements and compounds scientists consider indicators of potential habitability,” Jordan Karburn, Pandora’s deputy project manager said in a statement.
Daniel Apai, professor at Arizona University where the mission’s operations center lies, said that Pandora’s data will “help scientists interpret observations from past and current missions like NASA’s Kepler and Webb space telescopes. And it will guide future projects in their search for habitable worlds.”
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