The infrared telescope SPHEREx launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. NASA announced that the SPHEREx satellite will complement the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) by delivering an unprecedented survey of the universe. The new infrared observatory will add to what JWST and Hubble have already found. That combined data will help astronomers probe the deepest mysteries of the universe.
What else is known about the SPHEREx mission?
The SPHEREx telescope will scan the entire night sky four times using 102 infrared color sensors. Over two years it will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies, Live Science reported. The data will help scientists tackle major questions in cosmology — how galaxies form and evolve, where water comes from, and what happened during the universe’s earliest moments.
NASA believes that SPHEREx will be the perfect complement to JWST. “Taking a picture with JWST is like photographing a person. What SPHEREx can do is akin to switching to panoramic mode when you want to capture a large group of people and what is behind or around them,” explained Sean Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the astrophysics division at NASA headquarters.
SPHEREx, which cost $488 million and was developed over nearly ten years, will map the Universe by observing objects in optical and infrared light. The telescope will orbit the Earth about 14.5 times a day, completing a total of 11,000 orbits during its mission.
The team operating the cone-shaped telescope hopes to produce the most comprehensive map of the sky using some of the universe’s oldest light. With SPHEREx’s data, astronomers will study galaxies at different stages of evolution, track ice in space to learn how life-bearing ingredients formed, and probe the cosmic inflation that occurred right after the Big Bang.
SPHEREx is not the only useful payload on board the Falcon 9 rocket. Along with the telescope, a group of four solar probes called PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify Corona and Heliosphere) has also embarked into space. These satellites will study how the Sun’s corona — the outer layer of plasma — transforms into solar wind.
“We expect to revolutionize space weather forecasting. This is the first mission capable of tracking space weather events in three dimensions,” noted Craig DeForest, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute and the principal investigator of the PUNCH mission.
