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NASA Launches SPHEREx Telescope to Explore Cosmic Origins and Water in the Milky Way
A NASA telescope embarked on a space mission from California recently, aimed at uncovering the universe’s origins and searching for concealed water reservoirs within our Milky Way galaxy, a vital component for sustaining life.
The telescope, named SPHEREx—an acronym for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer—was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
Over the course of its anticipated two-year mission, SPHEREx will gather extensive data on more than 450 million galaxies and over 100 million stars within our galaxy. The observatory intends to construct a three-dimensional map of the universe using 102 distinct colors, corresponding to individual light wavelengths, while examining the historical progression and development of galaxies.
The mission aspires to enhance the scientific community’s understanding of cosmic inflation—a concept describing the rapid expansion of the universe from a singular point just moments after the Big Bang, which is estimated to have occurred around 13.8 billion years ago.
“SPHEREx is focused on probing the origins of the universe and seeking insights into the brief moments immediately following the Big Bang,” stated Phil Korngut, an instrument scientist at Caltech working on the SPHEREx project.
Korngut explained, “The prevailing theory known as inflation suggests that the universe experienced a tremendous growth, expanding a trillion-trillion times from a size smaller than an atom in an incredibly short span of time.”
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the acting director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, emphasized that SPHEREx aims to capture “the echoes of the Big Bang—those fleeting moments immediately after the event that resonate within the regions SPHEREx will observe directly.”
The telescope will capture images in all directions surrounding Earth, dissecting the light emitted from billions of cosmic sources, such as stars and galaxies, into their primary wavelengths to analyze their composition and distance.
Within the Milky Way, SPHEREx will seek out water trapped in ice that lies on the surfaces of interstellar dust grains, located within vast clouds of gas and dust that are the building blocks of stars and planets.
The telescope will also investigate the presence of water along with molecules like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that may be frozen on dust grains in molecular clouds, which are dense regions of gas and dust throughout interstellar space. Scientists postulate that these icy reservoirs attached to dust grains could be key sites for water formation in the universe.
In addition to SPHEREx, a fleet of satellites was launched as part of NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, designed to enhance our understanding of solar wind, the constant stream of charged particles released from the sun.
This solar wind and intense solar events can significantly disrupt technology on Earth, interfering with satellites and potentially causing power outages.
The PUNCH mission aims to explore how the sun’s atmosphere transitions into the solar wind, the formation of structures within the solar wind, and the implications of these processes on Earth and the broader solar system.
The mission consists of four suitcase-sized satellites dedicated to observing the sun and its surrounding environment.
According to Nicholeen Viall, a PUNCH mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “Together, these satellites will create a comprehensive three-dimensional understanding of the solar corona—the sun’s atmosphere—as it transforms into the solar wind, which fills our entire solar system.”
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