Over the weekend, the Pandora space telescope was launched. Pandora is a small, near-infrared telescope, small enough to be built atop a commercial smallsat bus. This smallsat was in turn mated to a commercial, multi-satellite deployer on its launch vehicle; the vehicle also carried many other scientific and commercial payloads.
How is this relevant to asteroids, you ask? Simple: Pandora covers the same near-infrared as James Webb. Meanwhile, the James Webb telescope is completely, overwhelmingly oversubscribed. Applications to use James Webb outstrip available observing time by a factor of ~10. This is as expected; the whole point of JW was to offer a transformative astronomy capability, and sure enough, lots of people want this transformative capability to do bold, new science. Including asteroid people.
One of the use cases for JW is to observe nearby stars, for their planets (or potential planets). Nearby stars are not that dim. It’s the planet that’s dim, but things like transits do not view the planet directly. Transits measure the dip in starlight, as the planet crosses the disk of its host star. Pandora has enough aperture to see nearby stars, and enough signal-to-noise leeway to check for dips in those stars.
Pandora, then, does not compete with James Webb- it complements it. There’s just no way JW can check all possible stars in our region of the Milky Way. A second telescope is handy- if nothing else, Pandora can suggest which stars should or should not be re-checked by JW. That means more efficient use of JW’s precious time. And if JW doesn’t waste time on futile investigations, that means time freed to do productive things. Like threatening asteroid follow-up (e. g., 2024 YR4 just now), or interstellar objects (e. g., 3I), which actually need JW’s aperture. Given the cost of Pandora- versus the cost of JW- there might be an argument for a second build.
These photons are raining on us. We only need the will to catch them, by building suitable telescopes. Pandora and JW are suitable expressions of our will.