WASHINGTON — NASA has selected SpaceX to launch a small exoplanet science mission as a rideshare payload as soon as September.
NASA announced Feb. 10 it awarded a task order to SpaceX for the launch of the Pandora spacecraft. The task order is through the through the Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract, intended for small missions with higher acceptance of risk.
Pandora is a smallsat mission that is part of the agency’s Astrophysics Pioneers program for low-cost smallsats. The spacecraft features a 45-centimeter telescope equipped with optical and infrared detectors that will observe 20 stars known to have exoplanets over a one-year mission.
“Pandora’s primary goal is to probe into the atmospheres of exoplanets using transmission spectroscopy,” said Elisa Quintana, principal investigator for Pandora, during a Jan. 11 presentation about the mission at a meeting of the Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG).
Pandora is designed to help scientists determine if spectral signatures seen in certain exoplanets are caused by the presence of hydrogen or water in the planets’ atmospheres or instead are linked to variability in the star itself. “Stars are not uniform,” she said. “Pandora is essentially a calibration instrument to help address this problem.”
NASA announced Jan. 16 that the spacecraft bus for the mission was now complete, keeping the mission on track for a launch in the fall. The NASA announcement of the launch contract did not mention a launch date, but Quintana said at the ExoPAG meeting that they were planning to launch as soon as September as a rideshare payload.
Pandora is an ESPA Grande-class spacecraft, a category that includes spacecraft weighing up to 320 kilograms, and is designed to operate in a sun-synchronous orbit. That suggests Pandora could launch on SpaceX’s Transporter series of dedicated rideshare missions that send payloads to such orbits, but neither NASA nor SpaceX disclosed specifics.
The NASA announcement also did not disclose the value of the task order to SpaceX. The agency has regularly declined to release the cost of VADR task orders, claiming that such information is proprietary, although the agency does release the value of more traditional launch contracts.
