NASA launched a new space telescope, SphereX, on Tuesday evening. It is dedicated to documenting the history of the universe's emergence with the "Big Bang" and searching for the key ingredients for life beyond Earth. SphereX will map more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy and 450 million other galaxies in 3D.
Alongside SphereX, a separate mission, called Punch (Polarometer for Unifying Corona and Heliosphere), was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Both missions are "now on their way to mapping our universe like never before and revolutionizing space weather forecasting," according to NASA commentator Megan Cruz, who described the two science missions as landmark.
NASA’s SPHEREx spacecraft after completing environmental testing in November 2024 in a facility in Boulder, Colo.Credit...NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/science/spacex-nasa-spherex-punch-launch.html
As Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said, the observatory, which will complement other observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, "will answer fundamental questions, including: How does the universe work? How did we get there? Are we alone in it?" These are questions so big that we cannot answer them with a single instrument. We cannot even answer them with a single mission. We need an entire fleet to do this, and every time we launch a new telescope, we make sure it adds to that fleet in unique ways, compared to everything we've built before."
Spherex will orbit Earth 14.5 times a day at an altitude of 650 kilometers, completing more than 11,000 orbits during its two-year primary mission. During each orbit, it will collect images of a 360-degree strip of the celestial sky, creating a complete map. It will scan the sky in near-infrared wavelengths, invisible to the human eye, and will split the light into 120 colors, similar to a prism forming a rainbow from sunlight. This technique, known as spectroscopy, helps determine an object's distance, its formation history in the universe, and its chemical signature.
Shaun Domagal-Goldman also said: "Imagine you're a photographer planning to photograph wildlife in a forest. You might use a camera designed to zoom in on a tree, or perhaps even a bird's nest, or an egg inside it. That's what the James Webb Space Telescope does, because SphereX is a panoramic lens. It won't give us an egg in a nest on a tree; it will give us the forest with all its trees.
The Incredible Expansion of the Universe
By conducting 9 million observations of the Milky Way, the $488 million SphereX will search for hidden reserves of water, carbon dioxide, and other life-supporting molecules frozen in the clouds of interstellar gas and dust where new stars and planets are forming. It will also measure a cosmic phenomenon known as cosmic inflation.
NASA issued a statement saying, "In the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded a trillion trillion times in size." In a near-instantaneous event, we call it "cosmic inflation," which began about 14 billion years ago, we can observe its effects today in the vast distribution of matter in the universe. By mapping the distribution of more than 450 million galaxies, SPHEREX will help scientists improve our understanding of the physics behind this massive cosmic event. As for the separate PUNCH mission, she said it consists of four small satellites to study the origins of the solar wind and the flow of material from the sun, tracking its journey through the solar system in 3D.
Solar wind and other phenomena, such as solar flares, are known to influence space weather, causing radiation storms and affecting daily human life on Earth through power outages and damage to communications satellites. Therefore, PUNCH data could lead to greater accuracy in predicting such events, according to Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She added that the PUNCH mission will revolutionize our understanding of physics. "Space weather phenomena and how they propagate through the inner heliosphere on their way to Earth."
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