Elisa Quintana
Pandora Mission Update

OK.
So thanks everyone.
I am here to talk about a SmallSat called Pandora.
It's our launch here. So we're really excited to be here and and see everyone and tell everyone about what we're planning to do.
So Pandora was selected in early 2021.
As part of a new program by NASA, Astrophysics called The Pioneers Program, this was intended to provide a platform that's larger in scope and cost than Cubesats, but smaller than explorers missions.
And I'll talk a little bit more about the uniqueness of this.
This really nice platform.
And let's see.
No, the other big button OK.
So Pandora's primary goal is to probe into the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Using transmission spectroscopy and so this is a proven technique.
We've probably everyone here is is very aware of all the cool results we've seen from Hubble and now James Webb using this technique. But just to remind you, essentially you.
You observe a planet and its host star as the planet crosses in front of the star, you can take a spectrum of the light filtering through the planet's atmosphere.
And every planet has a unique spectral fingerprint, so you can learn a lot about the composition and makeup of every of each planet's atmosphere.
And so this technique has worked well for sort of giant planets.
Planets bigger than earth.
More puffy planets with Hubble.
And.
You know James Webb has these great capabilities to do this for smaller and smaller planets at higher and higher precision.
And so, well, that's great.
Oh, first, just a reminder of how the transmission spectroscopy technique works.
We don't actually resolve stars as you know.
We see these point sources and so we observe the collective light as a as a planet that's transiting.
And So what we do is we take the spectrum of the star and the planet in transit.
Then we take the spectrum of the start out of transit and subtract it, and in theory you should get the contribution from the planet's atmosphere.
And this works well when you when you know sort of the star. You know if you have a well characterized star that's static, that's great.
But as we know, stars are not uniform.
There we go.
They're magnetically active, especially the smaller stars that we're we're looking at.
With James Webb, we have dark cool spots and bright hot vacuoles. They vary spatially.
They vary with rotation and ultimately what happens is when you observe.
And do this difference technique. You don't always correct for the star.
And so Pandora's essentially.
Calibration.
Calibration instrument to help address this problem and so.
The problem?
There's a there's a few different ways that you can get stellar spectral contamination.
The most complicated one is when you have spots that are out of the transit cord.
So what you're assuming is a light source is a whole disk.
The planets actually just transiting a part of it, and so if you have star spots outside of the your transit corrid.
Or.
Brightness they can dilute transits, or they can deepen transits, and those difference in these transit measurements ultimately propagate into your Spectra. Then your inferences are wrong.
You can mask or mimic features and you know when you have this great instrument like the James Wolf telescope, and you want to announce the detection of water on an earth sized planet like you want to be sure that's a robust result.
So Pandora's ultimate goal is to obtain long duration multi wavelength observations specifically to quantify and correct for stellar contamination.
And this is not a new problem.
It's been a problem for or. It's been known for decades.
It's been increasingly.
Discussed more and more because we have the James Webb High Precision instruments and so here I put a few snapshots of some of the first early results from the James Wood Space Telescope on transmission spectroscopy of Earth sized planets.
And this graphic on the left is is really nice to illustrate the problem. You can see that the web data points in black and what you do is you collect data points and then you use models to try to identify.
To infer what's what's in the atmosphere, and so you can fit both a planetary atmosphere, but you can also fit a model that's contributions from the star. And So what we're lacking is the short wavelength data.
That can disentangle these two models. And so, you know, unfortunately, these two results couldn't definitively say we've detected an atmosphere in a resized planet with web.
And so we this was known that this was going to be a problem with web and then we're seeing it more and more and.
That is.
That is why.
We developed this this mission.
Just quickly.
So we have two objectives we want to.
Obtained to to reach to have a successful mission. The first one is to really characterize the spot covering fraction and provide the necessary data that we can use into our models to disentangle the planet and star signals.
And we don't want to do it just for. Well, we'll do it for individual planets, but we we want to explore collectively. Are there trends with star types?
Planet parameters. Is this something that we can find models that we can apply to other planets, or is it the case that we're going to have to obtain long?
Baseline observations for every planet to correct for stellar contamination like we don't know.
So that's one of the primary objectives.
The other is to learn how well we can correct for stellar contamination.
And once we do that.
Look to see what?
What are these atmospheric composed of?
And what's nice about having a small set is that you can stare on targets for a long time, so you're not going to get this with Hubble or web.
You don't get to sit on a target for, you know, days at a time, but with a small set you can.
So for Pandora, our prime mission is consists of 20 exoplanet targets. Some of these targets target stars have multiple planets.
For each planet we're going to observe 10 transits.
And then we're going to observe 24 hours per transit.
And so we're going to get a really nice baseline of of the star.
As it as it as it rotates, you can map out some of the spots and.
We'll be taking both visible photometry and spectroscopy at the same time to get this data that we need.
And our targets include currently M&K dwarfs.
We are.
We can have some G dwarfs and earth to Jupiter size planets.
OK.
So just how are we gonna do this?
So we have this Pandora observatory at the heart of Pandora is 1/2 meter telescope that was actually designed for another government agency. It came across our way the at the prime time. And we are fortunate that we could use this in a Espa Grande.
Satellite that satisfies the small SAT requirements and I forgot my glasses so.
Yeah. So our so the telescope is an all aluminum half meter telescope built by Corning and New Hampshire.
We have two channels.
We have a visible channel.
That will collect data to identify star spots, which I'll show you in the next slide.
And then we have a near infrared H2RG, which is a a flight spare from James Webb near Cam.
And so we're fortunate to have that available and also.
We've been interacting with the near camp team to really quantify the best use of calibrating it and testing it.
On the right you can see where they the two detector assemblies are in the payload.
On the bottom you can see what our telescope looks like and if you come to our booth, we're going to actually have.
A.
A life-size unit of our telescope, so come visit us and we can talk more about the.
About the telescope and design and anything else.
OK.
So the for visible photometry, we selected this band because it it provides high contrast.
So we can get a good good constraints on the spot contrast and then our infrared detector will observe in a band that's comparable to Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, where it's sensitive to water. And so together by obtaining simultaneously we can get enough information to.
To model the stellar contamination.
Just so you can see what the data actually looks like that gets to the ground on the left are the sort of images from the target star in in the top left, and then we're going to select another.
Subset of stars to help us with.
Our calibration and processing and photometry on the right is what our spectral looks like from the H2RG, and we'll have a lot of people here that are working on the data processing. If you want to ask more questions.
I'm happy to point you towards our way.
And this is just a high level overview. The data from Pandora will go to University of Arizona, who has a mission operation center.
Being built right now, we're the first ones that are going to use it.
It's really fun working with them and helping them develop that.
The Science Operation Center is at Goddard.
We have sort of a grassroots program where a small mission, but we're doing a lot of the planning there.
The data will be processed through.
NASA Ames and then ultimately archive dot at at the Exit Planet Archive. And we also have team members from mass who are helping us maximize.
The the data archiving and products and getting those accessible to the public.
OK, so one of the unique things about the Pioneer's mission is that.
That they really encourage heavy participation from early career scientists.
So this is great. More than half of our team, our early career scientists or engineers and.
Over half of our leadership positions are filled by these early career scientists and engineers, and so we've provided a mentoring program where we have both experienced scientists and engineers.
Matched with early career scientists and we give them key leadership roles.
We also have a graduate student shadow program where we've had a grad student shadow someone in in a key leadership position each year that has worked really well and and so we're really proud of the contributions from from all of these team members. And we've had lots of.
Interns, both in the engineering side and the science centers.
And this is really wordy, but I just wanted to highlight that we have a number of different working groups within our science team.
Focused on the targets and the data analysis, but the ones with the stars are ones where there's more sort of community engagement plans currently underway. And so one, we have a ground based observations science working group that will also include space based observations.
So Pandora will be flying concurrently with Hubble and Webb.
We'd like to maximize the use of simultaneous observations, perhaps.
And so. So that's one way to get involved.
The other is auxiliary science.
I'll show you soon.
The observing time and what we have remaining for other types of science.
But there's more to come on these. Again, we're a small mission. We don't have a budget for AGI or Geo program, but we're doing our best to try to engage the community and.
Our project scientist is working on those.
Those programs right now.
OK.
So just quickly, let's see.
I only have 5 minutes.
We have a robust well.
We have a scheduler that we're currently trying to make more efficient.
This shows a year in the life.
So The Pioneers are five year program from start to finish.
Our plan is to hopefully launch this fall.
We'll have a a month of commissioning and a year of operations. And so here we're just showing a snapshot of how we would.
Land the observations to get 10 transits per target, so each line is for a different target.
And we have different priority weights at the end of the day, if you, if you, if you think about we have 20 targets and 24 hours.
Per transit and 10 transits per target, that that's 200 days. So with a year of observations, that still leaves us 135 days for for an example of unscheduled time and so.
Sure, we might have anomalies, but we'll still have.
We should have plenty of time for more exoplanet targets or for new science.
So we're really excited about that. And we're also amenable to an extended mission if there is support.
And I think a lot of people are interested in what what targets we're looking at.
I'll point you to our website pandora.com. We currently have.
Top 20, I think maybe a Top 40 target list on that page. It shows our selection methodology.
I'm happy to discuss it more if you want to come talk to me or any of my teammates.
But we I will say that our target list is flexible.
So we're going to set it a few months before launch.
But we will have opportunities to swap them in and out as we know exoplanets is a very rapidly evolving field and we'll see new results from web that we might want to observe. And so it's good to have that flexibility.
OK.
So where are we now?
We're currently in the integration process.
Again, we're selected in early 2021.
We had our first gate review in the fall of 2021 where we were given authority to proceed.
So thank you, Paul Hertz.
Giving us that green light and we're hoping we can prove that you can do great astrophysics in this small platform.
Currently, we passed our critical design review last October.
This month we have one of our milestones for where the spacecraft is being delivered.
We have a few more months of integration and testing.
There will be a press release on Thursday talking about this, this milestone of the spacecraft spacecraft lesson and where we're going.
For the next year, if all goes well and we get a ride.
We are looking at launch in, in the fall and if I get a ride, I mean Pandora is a rideshare payload.
We don't get our own launch vehicle.
We're going.
We're in the Esplanade class and so we have to look for a ride along with other pioneers, and so hopefully the stars will align and we will be launched in September.
We saw this earlier, I think from from Nick or a few other people, but it's really exciting to see Astaphysics starting to populate these small missions. And we in Pandora's now on there.
And.
I think this is my. Yeah. Second to last slide, we have a lot of activities here this week.
We have some hyperwell talks.
I just want to highlight our early career talks on Thursday.
Are most of our Pandora talks. Aisha Ayer is a is a Pandora NASA postdoc, so she'll be giving her thesis talk. Our other Pandora NPP has been hoard. He'll be giving the press briefing and then we have a number of other talks that you can see here and.
Again, we'll be in the SMD area.
We'll have our booth there.
We'd love to talk to you about the mission and how you can get involved and answer any other questions that you have.
I'll leave this last light up.
That's a mission at a glance.
Thank you.
Pick timing. One minute for question.
Any questions?
Yes, there in the back.
Great talk.
So my question is, you mentioned there would be additional science time, but there's no Geo program. So if I want to use Pandora, what's the procedure?
Yeah, so I'm looking.
I'm I'm looking at my project scientist right now so.
We have been looking at the best way we can engage the community.
And get input.
You know, we have a really vibrant and active science team and and and the science team has been doing a lot of sort of rigorous flushing out of the targets and prioritizing them.
But we know that, you know, we don't know everything.
And maybe there's other science exoplanet science targets, plus other science.
Maybe you know, beyond the science team.
That I think in the coming months there should be.
Some information about that.
We were prioritizing just getting.
Our ducks in a row to meet the objectives.
And then now you know we have a small team.
Very small or very small budget.
Right now we're trying to identify what's the best path forward.
And so I think I would say stay tuned in the next few months because our project scientist has actively started thinking about what would a ddt program look like.
How do we?
Get people involved in these science.
How do we get input into these science working groups so we know what?
How could we maximize Pandora by using?
Simultaneous web and simultaneous Hubble or SWIFT or whatever tests. And so we do want input, and we do want to maximize this. Most of the people in our leadership team have worked on Kepler tests and guess GI and Geo programs we.
We're very much supportive of.
Community engagement and facilitating science for the community.
So we have very have we have that high in our on our radar and how to do that what it looks like at the moment.
I we don't have anything just yet, but it's coming in a few months.
Thank you.
Hey, thank you very much, Lisa.
Let's thank also all the speakers.