NASA’s Pandora Mission Begins Study of Exoplanets, Host Stars - UNIVERSE

Pandora, NASA’s newest exoplanet mission and the first satellite to launch through the agency's Astrophysics Pioneers program, is now making unique observations of worlds beyond our solar system and the stars they orbit. The mission will determine the atmospheric make-up of at least 20 exoplanets, including the presence of hazes, clouds, and water.

“Pandora’s data will help close a major gap in our knowledge about planets and their host stars because, right now, we can’t be entirely sure how the star’s light affects measurements of what makes up exoplanet atmospheres,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We designed the Pandora spacecraft and its in-depth observing program to better understand this vexing issue.”

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Pandora mission, which will help scientists untangle the signals from exoplanets' atmospheres and their stars.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab

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The results of the mission will lay a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, as well as future observatories focused on finding habitable worlds. In fact, Pandora’s near-infrared detector is a spare originally developed for Webb.

"The spacecraft is healthy and all of the instruments are performing as well as we could have hoped,” said Jordan Karburn, Pandora’s deputy project manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “Our team’s hard work throughout the commissioning process has paid off, and we can now confidently start science."

This artist’s concept summarizes NASA’s Pandora mission and its science goals. Pandora will repeatedly observe multiple planets and their host stars in both visible and near-infrared light. These measurements will enable astronomers to separate chemical fingerprints detected in a planet’s atmosphere from potentially misleading signals originating from its host star.

NASA/Sophia Roberts

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Launched into low Earth orbit on Jan. 11, Pandora is an ambitious small satellite (SmallSat) funded by NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program. Pioneers are designed to explore compelling questions about the universe with fast-paced, low-cost missions that require a higher-than-usual tolerance for failure. 

Three factors make Pandora unique. It carries a novel all-aluminum telescope about 18 inches (45 centimeters) in diameter, it will study planets and their host stars simultaneously in both visible and infrared light, and it will observe targets for a much longer time than flagship observatories like Webb are able to.

Telescopes can sample a planet’s atmosphere in systems where the planet passes in front of its star as seen from our perspective. During this event, called a transit, some starlight skims the planet’s atmosphere before making its way to us. As this light interacts with atmospheric molecules, their chemical fingerprints become embedded in it. For each molecule, astronomers see brightness dips at characteristic wavelengths. 

But our instruments also see light from the whole star, not just what grazes the planet. Stellar surfaces aren’t uniform. They sport hotter, brighter areas called faculae and cooler, darker regions similar to sunspots. Both can grow, shrink, and change position as the star rotates.

“Water is one of the most important molecules we can measure to understand the composition and physical conditions of an exoplanet atmosphere,” said Benjamin Rackham, a team member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “But features on the star can distort the water signal we’re searching for. Pandora is designed to disentangle the signals from the planet and the star, helping us to understand the planets more accurately and laying the groundwork for the eventual study of planets that could harbor life.”

Watch to learn more about NASA’s Pandora mission, which will revolutionize the study of exoplanet atmospheres.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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Pandora’s telescope, jointly developed by Livermore and Corning Specialty Materials in Keene, New Hampshire, and its detectors make up the mission’s heart. The detectors will capture the star’s brightness in visible light and its near-infrared spectrum at the same time, while also obtaining a near-infrared spectrum from the planet when it transits the star. Over the course of its year-long primary mission, Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets 10 times with a long-duration stare covering 24 hours, with a transit included in each observation.

“Pandora’s advantage is its ability to observe targets for extended periods at multiple wavelengths, something high-demand flagship missions like Webb cannot regularly do,” said Knicole Colón, the mission’s project scientist at NASA Goddard. “Combining Pandora and Webb data will uniquely enable scientists to determine the properties of stellar surfaces and cleanly separate star and planetary signals.”

Pandora is led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides the mission’s project management and engineering. Pandora’s telescope was manufactured by Corning and developed collaboratively with Livermore, which also developed the imaging detector assemblies, the mission’s control electronics, and all supporting thermal and mechanical subsystems. The infrared sensor was provided by NASA Goddard. Blue Canyon Technologies provided the bus, performed spacecraft assembly, integration and environmental testing, and is providing mission operations support. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley performs the mission’s data processing. Pandora’s science data is available at the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by IPAC at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The University of Arizona leads mission operations for Pandora and contributes to its science program. Many additional universities also support the science team.

To learn more about the Pandora mission, please visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/pandora/ 

Source: NASA’s Pandora Mission Begins Study of Exoplanets, Host Stars - NASA Science

A Two-in-One Nanoparticle That Lights Up Brain Cancer, Then Destroys What’s Left

Glioblastoma has a grim reputation among brain cancers, and for good reason. It tends to weave itself into surrounding healthy brain tissue, which makes complete surgical removal nearly impossible without risking damage to areas surgeons need to protect. The blood-brain barrier compounds the problem, blocking most drugs and limiting how well radiotherapy can reach the tumor. Put those two obstacles together and it’s easier to understand why the five-year survival rate for glioblastoma sits at only around 7 percent.

A team from the University of Technology Sydney, Harvard Medical School, and Henan University has now developed a nanoparticle platform, published in Science Translational Medicine, that tries to tackle both of glioblastoma’s core problems with a single material, one that does its job in two separate acts.

One Material, Two Jobs

At the heart of the system is an ultra-thin two-dimensional sheet, precisely decorated with individual atoms using a fabrication technique borrowed from semiconductor manufacturing. That structure gives the material a kind of dual identity: during surgery, it acts as a highly sensitive imaging agent, and once the visible tumor has been removed, the very same material can be reactivated to mop up what’s left behind.

Both roles are triggered by the same near-infrared light, which is what allows one platform to switch between guiding the surgeon’s hand and finishing the job afterward.

Seeing Tumor Clusters Surgeons Would Otherwise Miss

During the operation, a fluorescent dye engineered into the nanosheet glows under a near-infrared wavelength invisible to the naked eye. According to Dr. Bingyang Shi, who led the work, this allows surgeons to make out individual tumor cell clusters as small as 44 micrometers, a level of resolution beyond what current clinical imaging tools can offer. A targeting molecule attached to the material also helps it cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate specifically in glioma cells, rather than diffusing indiscriminately through healthy tissue.

Then, a Second Act: Cleaning Up What Surgery Couldn’t Reach

Once the visible tumor is out, the same nanomaterial gets a second job. Applied directly into the surgical cavity and reactivated with the same light, it converts the tumor’s own hydrogen peroxide into oxygen, undercutting the low-oxygen environment that glioblastoma cells often rely on to resist treatment. At the same time, the light triggers heat and reactive molecules that go after the microscopic cancer cells surgery physically couldn’t remove.

That second act matters because glioblastoma’s most dangerous trait isn’t the tumor mass itself, but the scattered, invisible cells it leaves behind, the ones responsible for most recurrences.

Encouraging Numbers, With a Big Caveat

In mouse models of glioblastoma, the treatment meaningfully cut down tumor recurrence after surgery. Every treated mouse was still alive 60 days later, compared with a median survival of just 42 days among mice that had surgery alone. Follow-up testing turned up no detectable neurological or motor problems tied to the treatment.

“Professor Shi is careful to frame this as early, animal-only research, encouraging, but still a long way from clinical use, with imaging and therapeutic performance yet to be confirmed at the scale of a human brain.”

If the results hold up through further testing, the long-term hope is fairly intuitive: surgeons could see more of the tumor while operating, and treat more of what’s left behind once they’re done, chipping away at recurrence, which remains one of the toughest problems in glioblastoma care.

Original paper: Shangguan, P. et al. (2026). Spatiotemporal-switchable 2D NIR-II single-atom nanozyme for single-cell–level surgical navigation and glioblastoma phototherapy. Science Translational Medicine, 18(861). 

Source: A Two-in-One Nanoparticle That Lights Up Brain Cancer, Then Destroys What’s Left