NASA's Pandora SmallSat Mission: Multiwavelength Characterization of Exoplanets and Their Host Stars

The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA mission set to launch in 2025 and is designed to investigate the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets using transmission spectroscopy. From the outset, TESS was intended to find many of the exoplanets most amenable to this technique, and it has with the discovery of a significant fraction of the exoplanet targets with approved JWST programs. However, high-precision transmission spectroscopy measurements are easily contaminated by the presence of star spots, possibly making the origin of spectral features ambiguous. Pandora will address this stellar contamination issue through simultaneous long-duration, visible-light photometric observations and near-IR spectra. These simultaneous multiwavelength observations will constrain spot covering fractions of exoplanet host stars, disentangling the star and planet signals in transmission spectra to more reliably determine planetary atmosphere compositions. Pandora will observe at least 20 Earth- to Jupiter-sized exoplanets on orbits around host stars spanning late G through M spectral types. We will present a mission status update, an overview of the science goals, target selection, observing strategy, and synergies with TESS and other observing facilities.