Reading Exoplanet Atmospheres

A new space telescope is poised to fly sometime in the first quarter of 2026, looking nothing like the exoplanet observatories that went aloft before it and doing nothing like the job they’ve done. The latest planet hunter, dubbed Pandora, is a flyweight machine, tipping the scales at just 716 lbs. and measuring just 17 inches across, not counting its solar panel. That’s a rounding error compared to the Webb telescope, which is as large as a tennis court and weighs 13,000 lbs. Pandora will operate for only a year, and unlike Kepler and the others, which observe bushel baskets of planets, it will pay attention only to 20 hand-selected ones—but it will study them for vastly longer than any other telescope has, staring at a star system for up to 24 hours at a time and repeating each such session nine more times for every star it studies. Those detailed observations could go a long way toward determining if the conditions for life exist on distant worlds. But the job won’t be easy.

Read more: https://time.com/7335787/pandora-spac...

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