Nature magazine: NASA’s latest telescope is a feat of early-career leadership
The Pandora satellite provides career training grounds while observing exoplanets.
Pandora’s launch marks a first for many of the scientists and engineers involved in the mission.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Read the full article at Nature.com
On the morning of 11 January, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California to send NASA’s latest telescope into orbit. As the satellite, named Pandora, was released from its launch vehicle, “we were all in tears”, says Ben Hord, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who’s been working on the mission for about four years. “It’s strange to see your co-workers cry, but in that moment, it just made sense.”
Pandora is the first satellite of NASA’s Pioneers Program to ascend into space. There are four satellites among the seven current Pioneers missions, each with a budgetary cap of US$20 million — just a sliver of the funds typically awarded to flagship missions such as the $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The projects will address more-focused questions than larger missions; Pandora, for instance, will zero in on some 20 exoplanets and their host stars to learn more about the planets’ atmospheres.
But for Hord and other team members, Pandora marks another first: it’s the first spacecraft launch of their careers, a rite of passage for the up-and-coming team. Because of their smaller scales, the Pioneers missions present a wealth of opportunities for early-career researchers, and Pandora’s staff list is scattered with recent graduates. A statement from the University of Arizona in Tucson — where mission operations are based — says that more than half of the mission’s leading scientists and engineers are early in their careers. This is “really unheard of elsewhere in the NASA mission space”, Hord says.