Wednesday 12 / March / 2025
Florida: NASA on Tuesday launched its newest space telescope, SPHEREx, designed to map the entire sky in unprecedented colour.
It rocketed toward orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The US space agency said the telescope will help explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments.
"SPHEREx is really trying to get at the origins of the universe - what happened in those very few first instants after the Big Bang," SPHEREx instrument scientist Phil Korngut of Caltech said.
Tagging along were four suitcase-size satellites assigned to a mission called PUNCH to study the sun.
The launch comes after it was postponed because of bad weather and issues with the rocket after the original window opened on February 28.
What is the mission?
SPHEREx — short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionisation and Ices Explorer — is a $488 million (€477 million approx.) mission.
The megaphone-shaped telescope will take pictures in every direction around Earth, splitting the light from billions of cosmic sources, including stars and galaxies, into their component wavelengths to determine their composition and distance.
"We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colours," said NASA scientist Jamie Bock. "Whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries," Bock added.
The observatory will take six months to survey the entire sky with its infrared eyes and wide field of view.
The project will gather data on more than 450 million galaxies and create a three-dimensional map of the cosmos in 102 colors.
Closer to home in our own Milky Way galaxy, Spherex will hunt for water and other ingredients of life in the icy clouds between stars where new solar systems emerge.
Alongside SPHEREx, NASA launched the PUNCH mission to learn how the Sun's corona becomes the solar wind.
The mission uses four small satellites, each the size of a suitcase, to study the sun and its surroundings.
"Together, they piece together the three-dimensional global view of the solar corona - the sun's atmosphere - as it turns into the solar wind, which is the material that fills our whole solar system," PUNCH mission scientist Nicholeen Viall said.
