The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA’s Pandora small satellite, Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS), and Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope (BlackCat) CubeSat lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. | SpaceX
Posted on AZDailySun.com on 01/15/2026
As day threatened to break this past Sunday, sky watchers in California and Arizona witnessed a breathtaking sight of what appeared to be a super comet soaring through the sky. In reality, it was not any sort of natural celestial body but the dramatic exhaust plume from the latest SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to be launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California. For casual observers, it was a moment of awe. For Lowell Observatory scientist Dr. Joe Llama, it was something far more meaningful. Riding atop that Falcon 9 was a small telescope called SPARCS, a spacecraft he has spent years helping bring to life.
SPARCS (The Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) is a compact space telescope about the size of a family-sized cereal box. SPARCS was developed at ASU by a team consisting of engineers and scientists from institutions across the US, including Lowell Observatory. Its mission is to study how active certain low-mass stars (stars with masses less than about two times the mass of our Sun) behave in the ultraviolet (UV). These stars often produce strong flares and sunspot activity, and SPARCS will monitor them in both far-UV and near-UV wavelengths to understand how their radiation affects nearby planets.
Understanding low-mass stars is essential because they dominate our galaxy. Astronomers estimate that around 50 billion of them host at least one small planet in the habitable zones. Also known as the Goldilocks zone, a habitable zone is the region around a star where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface. Liquid water is considered a key ingredient for life, making these planets prime targets in the search for habitable worlds. But there’s a catch; the habitable zones of these low-mass stars lie extremely close to the star, so close that the planets are bombarded by intense UV radiation.
This radiation can dramatically reshape a planet’s atmosphere. Strong UV flares can strip away atmospheric gases, alter chemical balances, and potentially sterilize a planet’s surface. On the other hand, some UV radiation may be necessary to drive the chemical reactions that lead to life. The challenge is determining where the balance lies, and whether planets around these stars can remain stable enough for life to take hold.
That is where SPARCS comes in. By monitoring the UV behavior of low-mass stars over long periods, SPARCS will provide the first detailed, time-dependent measurements of their radiation environments. These data will help scientists determine whether planets around such stars experience relatively calm conditions or face constant, life-threatening bombardment. For Llama and his collaborators, SPARCS represents a major step toward answering one of astronomy’s most compelling questions of whether planets can survive around the galaxy’s most common stars.