NASA's Pandora Telescope Launch: Expected to Take James Webb to New Heights in Finding Habitable Planets

 NASA's Pandora Telescope Launch: Expected to Take James Webb to New Heights in Finding Habitable Planets

The James Webb Space Telescope's efforts to search for habitable exoplanets will now get a big boost from Pandora, which will observe its new companion stars.

On January 11, 2026, I watched anxiously at the tightly controlled Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched NASA's new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit.

Exoplanets are planets orbiting other stars. Seen from Earth, these planets appear like faint dots because they are so close to their host stars, which are millions to billions of times brighter than the planets, that they block out the light reflected from the planets.

The Pandora telescope will work with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to study these distant planets and their stars.

An astronomy professor at the University of Arizona with expertise in interstellar planets and astrobiology, is a Pandora co-investigator and leads its Exoplanet Science Working Group.

"We built PANDORA with the goal of breaking a major barrier—to understand and remove the source of a visible "noise" in the data that is limiting our ability to study small exoplanets microscopically and find life there," he said.

How are exoplanets observed?

Astronomers use a method to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, according to LiveScience. As the planet passes in front of its host star, light from the star is filtered through the planet's atmosphere and can be observed.

These 'planetary transit' observations are like holding a glass of red wine in front of a candle. The light passing through the glass gives subtle information about the quality of the wine. Likewise, analyzing starlight passing through a planet's atmosphere can detect water vapor, hydrogen, clouds, and even signs of possible life. Improvements in these technologies in 2002 opened exciting doors to new worlds.

For a while everything seemed fine. But after 2007, astronomers began to realize that dust and active regions on stars—known as starspots—could distort transit measurements.

In 2018 and 2019, the then PhD student Benjamin V. In studies jointly published by Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampappa, and these researchers, it was shown that dark starspots and bright, magnetically active regions can seriously confound exoplanet measurements. The team named this problem the “transit light source effect”.

Most stars are active, have spots, and are constantly changing. They showed that these changes alter the signals from the exoplanet itself.

Even more problematic is that some stars also have water vapor in their upper layers, which is often more visible inside the starspot than outside. This can cause astronomers to think that water vapor is found on the planet, but it may actually be caused by the star itself.

In their studies, published three years before the James Webb Space Telescope's launch in 2021, the team warned that the Webb may not reach its full potential. The danger was pointed out. Astronomers began to realize that they were trying to judge the quality of wine by flickering and unstable candlelight.