NASA Awards SpaceX Launch Contract for Pandora Mission
The selection falls under NASA's Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract. This agreement allows the agency to issue fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity task orders over a five-year period, with an overall contract ceiling of $300 million.
Over the course of its primary one-year mission, Pandora will conduct ten observational cycles for each exoplanet, with each session lasting 24 hours. These transits, during which a planet moves across the face of its star, will yield crucial data regarding both the exoplanet and its stellar counterpart.
The mission's observational capabilities are driven by a cutting-edge 17-inch (45-centimeter)-wide, all-aluminum telescope. This instrument will concurrently measure the visible and near-infrared brightness of the host stars while obtaining near-infrared spectral data from transiting planets. This approach will allow scientists to effectively differentiate between stellar and planetary signals. The data collected will support ongoing and future efforts, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the forthcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory, in the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.
Pandora is a collaborative initiative led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in partnership with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The mission is funded through NASA Headquarters' Astrophysics Pioneers program, which supports astrophysics projects utilizing compact, cost-effective instruments and payloads. NASA's Launch Services Program, headquartered at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, oversees the VADR contract.
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