NASA officials on Monday announced SpaceX and its Starbase launch facility is the space agency's choice to launch the Pandora satellite mission on a date that is yet to be determined.
The Pandora satellite launch likely will occur sometime in the fall after the recent completion of the spacecraft bus that supports the satellite mission's structure, power and other systems.
"This is a huge milestone for us and keeps us on track for a launch in the fall," said Elisa Quintana, Pandora's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
"The bus holds our instruments and handles navigation, data acquisition and communication with Earth -- it's the brains of the spacecraft."
The Pandora is a small satellite that is designed to study the atmospheres of respective planets that are located beyond the solar system.
The satellite also will record the activities of respective host stars and how light is affected when planets pass in front of the stars.
Such celestial events make it possible to learn about the respective planets' atmospheres by recording how light passes through them, according to NASA.
The information collected by the Pandora satellite will assist NASA researchers to verify measurements taken by the space agency's James Webb Space Telescope and future NASA missions that search for habitable worlds.
The presence of water will help determine which planets might be explored during such future missions.
The Pandora satellite will be equipped with an extra near-infrared detector that originally was developed for the Webb space telescope and will be used to improve the telescope's ability to separate star signals from the respective planet's atmosphere.
The result is much more precise measurements of each planet's atmosphere and the potential for a planet containing water.
"We see the presence of water as a critical aspect of habitability because water is essential to life as we know it," Goddard's Ben Hord, a NASA post-doctoral program fellow, said during the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Md.
"The problem with confirming its presence in exoplanet atmospheres is that variations in light from the host star can mask or mimic the signal of water," Hord said. "Separating these sources is where Pandora will shine."
The satellite will observe each planet at least 10 times with each observation lasting at least 24 hours. The resulting information will be transmitted to Earth via the supporting bus spacecraft.
The Pandora satellite will use a 17-inch-wide telescope that was developed by the Corning and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The initial Pandora mission is expected to last a year, is funded by NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers program and is a joint effort between NASA Goddard and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
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