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-i...