A NASA telescope was launched into space from California on Tuesday as part of a mission to investigate the origins of the universe and search for hidden water reservoirs in the Milky Way galaxy, an essential component for life.
The telescope, named SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), was lifted into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
During its two-year mission, the observatory will gather data on over 450 million galaxies and more than 100 million stars within the Milky Way. It will create a 3D map of the cosmos in 102 colors, representing individual wavelengths of light, and will investigate the history and evolution of galaxies.
The mission’s goal is to enhance our understanding of cosmic inflation—a phenomenon referring to the universe’s rapid expansion from a singular point right after the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.
“SPHEREx is really aiming to understand the origins of the universe—what happened in those brief initial moments after the Big Bang,” said SPHEREx instrument scientist Phil Korngut from Caltech.
He added, “The leading theory behind this is called inflation, which suggests the universe expanded enormously in just a fraction of a second, growing a trillion-trillion times from smaller than the size of an atom.”
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, stated that SPHEREx will search for “reverberations from the Big Bang—the moments after the Big Bang that echo into the regions SPHEREx is set to observe.”
SPHEREx will capture images in all directions around Earth, splitting light from billions of stars and galaxies into their individual wavelengths to analyze their composition and distance.
Within the Milky Way, SPHEREx will also seek out frozen water reservoirs on interstellar dust grains within large clouds of gas and dust that form stars and planets.
It will search for water and other molecules like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that are frozen on dust grains in molecular clouds, dense regions of gas and dust in interstellar space. Scientists believe these clouds are where most of the universe’s water is created and resides.
Along with SPHEREx, a constellation of satellites for NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission was launched. The PUNCH mission aims to better understand the solar wind, the continuous stream of charged particles emitted by the sun.
Solar wind and other solar events can disrupt human technology, including satellites and power systems. The PUNCH mission is focused on understanding how the sun’s atmosphere transitions into solar wind, how structures within the solar wind form, and how these processes affect Earth and the solar system.
The mission includes four suitcase-sized satellites that will study the sun and its environment.
“Together, they will provide a three-dimensional global view of the solar corona—the sun’s atmosphere—as it transforms into the solar wind that fills our solar system,” said PUNCH mission scientist Nicholeen Viall from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
