Daniel Apai's Blog on Exoplanet Exploration and Astrobiology
I am excited to start my sabbatical at MIT‘s Earths, Atmospherica, and Planetary Sciences department! I am looking forward to connecting with the MIT astrophysics, Earth and planetary sciences, atmospheric sciences, and aeronautical engineering communities. I have big plans for the sabbatical: I am very thrilled to work with Julien de Wit, Benjamin Rackham, Sara…
The “Habitable Zone” is a concept central to our search for extraterrestrial life – but it is not widely appreciated that it is only valid to planets with the same three dominant climate feedbacks as Earth. Would planets with climate feedback configurations somewhat different still have stable habitable climates?Or does Earth’s climate feedback configuration make…
It was fun to chat with Dr Ed Ackerley of The Morning Voice about Pandora, The University of Arizona’s roles and contributions to this exciting mission, and our search for extraterrestrial life! Ed’s show is providing excellent coverage of wonderful, positive results and news emerging from Tucson and The University of Arizona – I highly…
An incredible 24 hours! After a picture-perfect launch, Pandora is now in orbit, with solar panels deployed and alive (receiving commands from ground! After seven years of working on this project, it is so rewarding to see an idea become an actual NASA space telescope, pushing the frontiers of our knowledge. The launch from the…
It was an incredible experience to watch the SpaceX Twilight mission launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base on January 11, 2026! I will write more, but the most important news is that Pandora has been successfully deployed. Orbital altitude is even better than aimed for, which could further extend mission lifetime. BlackCat CubeSat and SPARCS…
Meeting Pandora for the first time! We recently visited our now-completed spacecraft in the cleanroom of Blue Canyon Technologies in Boulder, Colorado. Next, Pandora will be integrated into a SpaceX Falcon9 rocket for a January 5, 2026 launch from United States Space Force‘s Vandenberg base in California. It is so exciting that after six years…
On October 4, we had a great evening in Sedona’s Explorers Club Live Event “From the Edge of Space to the Depths of the Ocean”! I spoke about the progress in exoplanet discovery and characterization, and the technological advances that set us on a trajectory toward an exciting future: the Pandora SmallSat (which we are launching…
What an exciting Saturday!! After months of lab upgrades, our Moore Nanotechnology Systems GPM170 glass-pressing machine is certified and running perfectly! This machine provides excellent, 0.1K temperature stability (our previous machine had 40K temperature swings!). It is also completes a cycle 3x faster, molding a lens in less than an hour! We are getting much…
While in Iceland for the BEACON25 astrobiology meeting, I chatted with Forbes writer Bruce Dorminey about our recently published Quantitative Habitability framework (QHF). Bruce also did a video interview on his cell phone, in which we chatted about exoplanet exploration, astrobiology, and habitability.The article appeared on Thursday on Forbes and provides a great summary of…
We just wrapped up a wonderful week in California at the Silver Jubilee of the Summer Sagan School. The school explored exoplanet demographics with many exciting lectures and several hands-on activities and group projects. Many of the lectures and much of the discussion focused on sub-neptunes, an exciting, new type of planets that is absent…