Artist’s concept of the SPHEREx observatory in orbit. Credit: NASA
Launching with NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) satellites, NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe.
Over a two-year planned mission, the SPHEREx telescope will map the entire sky four times in near-infrared light which, though not visible to the human eye, serves as a powerful tool for answering cosmic questions. Using a tool called spectroscopy, SPHEREx will observe the sky in 102 infrared wavelengths, or colors — more than any other all-sky survey. Spectroscopy is used by scientists to measure the composition of cosmic objects and their distance.
With this colorful all-sky view, SPHEREx will shed new light on a cosmic phenomenon called inflation that caused the universe to expand a trillion-trillion-fold in size in the first fraction of a second after the big bang; measure the collective glow created by galaxies near and far, including hidden galaxies that have not been individually observed by other observatories; and survey the Milky Way galaxy for hidden reservoirs of water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients for life.
SPHEREx’s ability to scan large sections of the sky quickly and gather data on millions of objects complements the work of more targeted telescopes, like NASA’s Hubble and James Webb. The data from SPHEREx will be freely available to scientists around the world, providing a new encyclopedia of information about hundreds of millions of cosmic objects.
As a NASA Astrophysics mission, the agency selected SPHEREx as a Medium-Class Explorers mission in February 2019 to address the agency’s three core astrophysics goals: probe the origin and destiny of the universe, explore whether planets around other stars could harbor life, and explore the origin and evolution of galaxies.
The SPHEREx mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, for NASA’s Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The mission’s principal investigator is based at Caltech in Pasadena, which also developed the payload in collaboration with JPL. BAE Systems supplied the spacecraft. The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) is an instrument and science partner for the mission. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. In addition to scientists from Caltech, JPL, and KASI, the scientific analysis will include scientists from numerous institutions.
For more information about SPHEREx, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/
