Time was, we knew of only eight planets in all of the cosmos—the handful of local worlds that orbit our local sun. In 1992 that changed, when astronomers spotted two planets orbiting a pulsar 2,300 light years from Earth. Since then more than 6,000 other so-called exoplanets have been found, leading scientists to conclude that there is at least one planet orbiting all of the trillions upon trillions of stars in the universe. With so many planetary laboratories on which so much planetary chemistry could be playing out, who’s to say at least some of them wouldn’t be cooking up life? The little Pandora spacecraft aims to find out.