NASA’s new exoplanet-hunting satellite, Pandora, was successfully launched on January 11, 2026, aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Twilight rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Pandora is heading into a special orbit called a dusk-dawn Sun-synchronous orbit. In this path, the satellite stays almost constantly in sunlight, which keeps its instruments powered and avoids the extreme temperature changes that occur in Earth’s shadow.
This orbit lets Pandora glide along the line where day meets night, a zone of perpetual twilight. Being in constant “dawn” allows the satellite to observe distant stars continuously without interruptions, making it perfect for hunting exoplanets far away from our solar system.