Using only a very small craft, and a low Earth orbital trajectory — this lil’ guy is both very economical, and very efficient. It will help inform future JWST passes of these exo-wonders, looking for liquid water signatures at the most promising of them. Do read the Goddard Spcelight introduction — and watch the clever YouTube, below.

My tickets for four hours inside the Obama Presidential Library are up today at noon — so I’ll have more on that, tomorrow — but in the mean-time, this will likely be today’s only entry. Here’s Goddard’s blog:

…The results of the mission will lay a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, as well as future observatories focused on finding habitable worlds. In fact, Pandora’s near-infrared detector is a spare originally developed for Webb.

“The spacecraft is healthy and all of the instruments are performing as well as we could have hoped,” said Jordan Karburn, Pandora’s deputy project manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “Our team’s hard work throughout the commissioning process has paid off, and we can now confidently start science….”

Launched into low Earth orbit on Jan. 11, Pandora is an ambitious small satellite (SmallSat) funded by NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program. Pioneers are designed to explore compelling questions about the universe with fast-paced, low-cost missions that require a higher-than-usual tolerance for failure.

Three factors make Pandora unique. It carries a novel all-aluminum telescope about 18 inches (45 centimeters) in diameter, it will study planets and their host stars simultaneously in both visible and infrared light, and it will observe targets for a much longer time than flagship observatories like Webb are able to….

And, Goddard’s video explainer:

नमस्ते