Liftoff! NASA launches SPHEREx telescope — an infrared observatory that will help JWST solve the mysteries of the universe

NASA has launched a new infrared space telescope into orbit that is set to rival the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in its unprecedented view of our universe.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 11. at 11:10 p.m. EST.

Once it is fully online, the space telescope will scan the entire night sky a total of four times using 102 separate infrared color sensors, enabling it to collect data from more than 450 million galaxies during its planned two-year operation. This dataset will give scientists key insights into some of the biggest questions in cosmology: such as the ways galaxies take shape and evolve over time, the origins of water, and how our universe came to be.

This makes SPHEREx the perfect complement for the JWST, flagging regions of interest for the latter to study with greater depth and resolution.

"Taking a snapshot with JWST is like taking a picture of a person," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, told reporters during a news conference on Jan. 31. "What SPHEREx and other survey missions can do is almost like going into panorama mode, when you want to catch a big group of people and the things standing behind or around them."

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SPHEREx, which cost a total of $488 million and has been in development for roughly a decade, is set to map the universe by observing both optical and infrared light. It will orbit the Earth 14.5 times a day, completing 11,000 orbits during its lifetime to filter infrared light from distant gas and dust clouds using a technique called spectroscopy.

By peering through these clouds, the scientists operating the cone-shaped telescope hope to piece together an unprecedented picture of our cosmos using some of its most ancient light.

This will enable astronomers to study galaxies at various stages in their evolution; trace the ice floating in empty space to see how life may have begun; and even understand the period of rapid inflation the universe underwent immediately after the Big Bang.

"Literally a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the observable universe went through a remarkable expansion," Jamie Bock, principal investigator of SPHEREx at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said during the news conference. "Expanding a trillion trillion fold, and that expansion expanded tiny fluctuations smaller than an atom, to enormous cosmological scales that we see today... We still don't know what drove inflation or why it happened."

SPHEREx isn't the only payload aboard the rocket. The rocket is also carrying thePolarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) instrument, which will study how the sun's corona — its outermost layer of plasma — streams across our solar system in the form of solar wind.

"We expect we'll revolutionize how space weather is forecasted," Craig DeForest, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute and the PUNCH mission's principal investigator, said during a Feb. 13 news conference. "We're the first mission able to track space-weather events in three dimensions."