SpaceX Launches New NASA Telescope to Help JWST Study Exoplanets (livescience.com) 13
Last week a University of Arizona astronomy professor "watched anxiously...as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA's new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit."
In 2018 NASA had approached Daniel Apai to help build the telescope, which he says will "shatter a barrier — to understand and remove a source of noise in the data — that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them." Astronomers have a trick to study exoplanet atmospheres. By observing the planets as they orbit in front of their host stars, we can study starlight that filters through their atmospheres... But, starting from 2007, astronomers noted that starspots — cooler, active regions on the stars — may disturb the transit measurements. In 2018 and 2019, then-Ph.D. student Benjamin V. Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampapa and I published a series of studies showing how darker starspots and brighter, magnetically active stellar regions can seriously mislead exoplanets measurements. We dubbed this problem "the transit light source effect...."
In our papers — published three years before the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope - we predicted that the Webb cannot reach its full potential. We sounded the alarm bell... Pandora will do what Webb cannot: It will be able to patiently observe stars to understand how their complex atmospheres change.
By staring at a star for 24 hours with visible and infrared cameras, it will measure subtle changes in the star's brightness and colors. When active regions in the star rotate in and out of view, and starspots form, evolve and dissipate, Pandora will record them. While Webb very rarely returns to the same planet in the same instrument configuration and almost never monitors their host stars, Pandora will revisit its target stars 10 times over a year, spending over 200 hours on each of them.
It's the first space telescope "built specifically for detailed multi-color observations of starlight filtered through the atmospheres of exoplanets," reports the Arizona Daily Star, noting the University of Arizona will serve as mission control: [T]echnicians will operate Pandora in real time and monitor its telemetry and overall health under a contract with NASA... The spacecraft will undergo about a month of commissioning before beginning science operations, which are scheduled to last for a year...
Pandora was selected as part of NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers program, which was created in 2020 to foster compelling, relatively low-cost science missions using smaller, cheaper hardware and flight platforms with a price cap of no more than $20 million. By comparison, the Webb telescope — the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever sent into space — carries a pricetag of about $10 billion.
Pandora is a joint mission NASA and California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In 2018 NASA had approached Daniel Apai to help build the telescope, which he says will "shatter a barrier — to understand and remove a source of noise in the data — that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them." Astronomers have a trick to study exoplanet atmospheres. By observing the planets as they orbit in front of their host stars, we can study starlight that filters through their atmospheres... But, starting from 2007, astronomers noted that starspots — cooler, active regions on the stars — may disturb the transit measurements. In 2018 and 2019, then-Ph.D. student Benjamin V. Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampapa and I published a series of studies showing how darker starspots and brighter, magnetically active stellar regions can seriously mislead exoplanets measurements. We dubbed this problem "the transit light source effect...."
In our papers — published three years before the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope - we predicted that the Webb cannot reach its full potential. We sounded the alarm bell... Pandora will do what Webb cannot: It will be able to patiently observe stars to understand how their complex atmospheres change.
By staring at a star for 24 hours with visible and infrared cameras, it will measure subtle changes in the star's brightness and colors. When active regions in the star rotate in and out of view, and starspots form, evolve and dissipate, Pandora will record them. While Webb very rarely returns to the same planet in the same instrument configuration and almost never monitors their host stars, Pandora will revisit its target stars 10 times over a year, spending over 200 hours on each of them.
It's the first space telescope "built specifically for detailed multi-color observations of starlight filtered through the atmospheres of exoplanets," reports the Arizona Daily Star, noting the University of Arizona will serve as mission control: [T]echnicians will operate Pandora in real time and monitor its telemetry and overall health under a contract with NASA... The spacecraft will undergo about a month of commissioning before beginning science operations, which are scheduled to last for a year...
Pandora was selected as part of NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers program, which was created in 2020 to foster compelling, relatively low-cost science missions using smaller, cheaper hardware and flight platforms with a price cap of no more than $20 million. By comparison, the Webb telescope — the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever sent into space — carries a pricetag of about $10 billion.
Pandora is a joint mission NASA and California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Re: (Score:1)
Zombie projects shambling along from the before-times. One day they'll send up a rocket and discover the heat shield is actually made of egg cartons, like the armor on Putin's tanks when he ordered them to roll.
Re: (Score:3)
That's not exactly level 10 classified knowledge... at least, on the older Apollo-era craft (it was a honeycomb structure) (sacrificial). The shuttle-era heatshield were a combination of stuff (again, sacrificial). No idea about the exact materials... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure what classified has to do with anything. The Russian tanks weren't armored because the funds for that disappeared into someone's pocket. The egg cartons were placed on the tanks because they look vaguely like the missing armor panels from a distance.
Go back to previous discoveries? (Score:3)
I'm presuming this new telescope will be pointed at past discoveries of exoplanets to confirm they really are exoplanets and not these cool spots on the star. I know in some cases the atmosphere of the exoplanet has been studied, such as the one which might be raining diamonds [skyatnightmagazine.com], so those are probably safe.
Re: (Score:3)
The other problem is finding stars with planets whose plane of rotation lines up with us. If the planets rotate on a plane that does not cross in front of their sun from our viewpoint, studying the sun's variability won't reveal any data about their planets.
The other complication is the time it takes for the planet to rotate around the sun. It might take years before that planet crosses its sun's position again. In our solar system the three planets near the Goldilocks Zone take 225 days (Venus), 365 day
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds like a great way to obtain a doctorate.
Problem: Observe a start looking at Exo planet
Step 2 ??? (Wait)
Step 3: Paper
Step 4: PhD
Awe-inspiring ... (Score:2)
Getting to be pretty ordinary these days. It's awe-inspiring when the local bus shows up on time.
Re: (Score:2)
I am sure Elon Musk is responsible in some way for this atrocity.
More info (Score:3)
My star photometry memories from the past (Score:2)
I did multi-channel photometry of variable stars as an astrophysics student in early 1990s. We did not lead the scientific work, this was for actual scientists.
The measurements are time-consuming and tedious. You sit in an observatory and follow a protocol. Guide the telescope to a comparison star, guide it to the actual star to be measured, back and forth, for hours and hours, for nights and nights. The photometer takes the measurements, prints the graphs to long rolls of paper, that you will later measure
so lonely (Score:2)
People are so lonely, that now they are looking for friends hundreds of light years away.