NASA launches SPHEREx space telescope for $488 million — it will show what was hidden from Webb and Hubble’s «eyes»

The SPHEREx Space Observatory will offer additional «panoramic» views to the infrared images of the James Webb Space Telescope and help unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the Universe.

SPHEREx, along with the PUNCH solar probes, successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 11, and within hours, ground controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were already successfully established communication with him. Next, the telescope will undergo a one-month checkout period (calibration, cooling, etc.), and then it will be able to begin its main two-year mission, which will include creating a detailed 3D map of the sky.

Like the James Webb telescope, SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) works with infrared waves.

The reason why astronomers are so interested in infrared waves is due to the fact that the Universe has been expanding since the beginning of time. And this expansion affects the wavelengths of light emitted by interesting objects such as stars and traveling to our detectors on Earth. Shorter blue wavelengths can stretch like rubber bands and become longer, shifting into the red range, and when traveling across vast cosmic distances, this stretching becomes so significant that it eventually falls into the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

In general, this means that light coming from very distant objects is invisible to human eyes and most human technology, but not to powerful space telescopes like the Webb Space Telescope (JWST) or SPHEREx.

The resulting dataset from SPHEREx will provide scientists with key insights into some of the biggest questions in cosmology: how galaxies form and evolve over time, where water comes from, and how our universe came to be.

SPHEREx in numbers:

• The telescope cost about $488 million and took 10 years to develop.
• It will collect data on a phenomenon known as cosmic inflation, which has been occurring for almost 14 billion years — out of 10⁻³⁶ seconds after the Big Bang.
• It will map more than 450 million galaxies and make about 600 exposures per day.
• It will perform more than 11,000 rotations throughout the duration of the planned research and will orbit the Earth approximately 14.5 times a day.
• It will fly around the Earth at an altitude of about 650 kilometers.
• It will collect information on the composition and distance of millions of galaxies and stars in 102 wavelengths of infrared light.
• Create 4 maps of the entire sky during your mission, each with 6 months to complete.

Source: NASA, Space, livescience