Colloquium with Elisa Quintana, Astrophysicist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA flight project designed to study the atmospheres of exoplanets. Transmission spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets provides our best opportunity to identify the makeup of planetary atmospheres in the coming decade, and is a key science driver for HST and JWST. Stellar brightness variations due to star spots, however, have been shown to contaminate the observed spectra in these high-precision measurements. Pandora will collect long-duration photometric observations with a visible-light channel and simultaneous spectra with a near-IR channel to constrain star spot covering fractions of exoplanet host stars, enabling star and planet signals to be disentangled in transmission spectra to reliably determine exoplanet atmosphere compositions. Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets with sizes ranging from Earth-size to Jupiter-size and host stars spanning mid-K to late-M spectral types. Pandora was selected in early 2021 as part of NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers Program and is a partnership with NASA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Pandora is expected to launch into a Sun-Synch orbit in 2025, followed by a year of science operations. I will present an overview of the mission and discuss synergies with other ground and space-based facilities.