The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA flight project designed to study the atmospheres of exoplanets. Transmission spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets provides our best opportunity to identify the makeup of planetary atmospheres in the coming decade, and is a key science driver for HST and JWST. Stellar photospheric inhomogeneity due to star spots, however, has been shown to contaminate the observed spectra in these high-precision measurements. Pandora will address the problem of stellar contamination by collecting long-duration photometric observations sampled over a stellar rotation period with a visible-light channel and simultaneous spectra with a near-IR channel. These simultaneous multiwavelength observations will constrain star spot covering fractions of exoplanet host stars, enabling star and planet signals to be disentangled in transmission spectra to then reliably determine exoplanet atmosphere compositions. Pandora will observe exoplanets with sizes ranging from Earthsize to Jupiter-size and host stars spanning mid-K to late-M spectral types. Pandora was selected in early 2021 as part of NASA’s inaugural Astrophysics Pioneers Program. Herein, we present an overview of the mission, including the science objectives, operations, the observatory, science planning, and upcoming milestones as we prepare for launch readiness in 2025.
The upcoming NASA Pandora Mission, scheduled for launch in 2025, will obtain exoplanet transmission spectra and stellar activity information to better characterize and correct for the spectral contamination of transmission spectra by the host star. Pandora will obtain at least ten wavelength-resolved transits each of 20 unique exoplanets, each with 24 hours of stellar baseline per transit. This will provide the vital context needed to disentangle stellar contamination from exoplanet transmission spectroscopy around cool stars, and understand the impact of star spots on retrieved atmospheric properties. Pandora will be equipped with i) a visible detector, providing time-series photometry at 550nm, and ii) a near-infrared detector, providing R=30 spectra from 0.9 to 1.6 microns with at least 150ppm precision at J=9. We have developed an open-source simulator of Pandora data to assist in the development of a) the Pandora concept of operations b) the Pandora Science Pipeline and c) science analysis software to retrieve transmission spectra from Pandora data. In particular, we describe how we use the scipy.sparse Python submodule to create memory efficient simulations. This software is both fast and efficient, to enable various operating scenarios to be simulated. Our simulator tool (v.1.0) is available as open-source software, and much of the infrastructure can be generalized to other missions with similar specifications or detectors to Pandora.
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