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NASA’s Pandora mission, a pioneering small satellite telescope dedicated to studying the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, successfully launched today on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the highlight payload of the company’s first-ever Twilight commercial rideshare mission.

The Falcon 9 lifted off at 8:44 a.m. EST (5:44 a.m. PST) from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base. The mission marked SpaceX’s debut in a new class of rideshare flights distinct from its established Transporter and Bandwagon series. Twilight targets a specialized dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), where satellites follow Earth’s terminator line — the boundary between day and night — providing near-continuous sunlight exposure. This orbit is ideal for power-hungry applications like Earth observation, climate monitoring, and technology demonstrations, offering reliable solar power without the need for dedicated launches.

The rocket’s first stage successfully landed back at Vandenberg approximately 8.5 minutes after liftoff, demonstrating SpaceX’s reusable technology. Payload deployments began about 61 minutes into the flight and continued over roughly 90 minutes, with Pandora separating from the upper stage approximately 2 hours and 29 minutes after launch. The spacecraft is now en route to its operational orbit for a month-long commissioning phase before commencing its one-year prime science mission.

Pandora, the inaugural mission in NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program (with a cost cap of around $20 million), weighs approximately 716 pounds (325 kilograms) and features a novel all-aluminum 17-inch-wide (45-centimeter) Cassegrain telescope. It carries visible-light photometry and near-infrared spectroscopy instruments — including a flight-spare detector from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — to disentangle exoplanet atmospheric signals from host star variability, such as starspots and faculae.

The mission will target at least 20 known transiting exoplanets (from Earth-sized to Jupiter-sized) orbiting mid-K to late-M stars, previously identified by Kepler, TESS, and JWST. Pandora will conduct multiple extended 24-hour observations per target to quantify stellar contamination in transmission spectra and characterize atmospheres, including those dominated by hydrogen, water, clouds, or hazes.The Twilight mission carried approximately 40 payloads in total, including two other NASA-sponsored CubeSats: SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat), led by Arizona State University to study stellar flares and their impact on exoplanet habitability using ultraviolet observations, and BlackCAT (Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope), operated by Pennsylvania State University to detect X-ray flares from supermassive black holes and distant gamma-ray bursts.

Commercial payloads, many integrated by launch services provider Exolaunch, included satellites from Kepler Communications (optical relay network), Capella Space (Earth-imaging radar), Spire Global, and others focused on Internet-of-Things connectivity, 3D-printing experiments in space, and more.

Led by Principal Investigator Dr. Elisa Quintana at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Pandora is a collaboration involving Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the University of Arizona (mission operations), Blue Canyon Technologies (spacecraft bus), and other partners. All data will be publicly archived at NASA’s Exoplanet Archive.

This milestone launch underscores NASA’s innovative use of cost-effective small satellites and SpaceX’s expanding rideshare portfolio, advancing exoplanet science while democratizing access to specialized orbits for a growing commercial space sector.

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