An illustration of SPHEREx orbiting Earth. (Image courtesy of NASA)
NASA has launched a new infrared space telescope that is set to rival the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in providing unprecedented insight into our universe.
The Spectrophotometer for the Analysis of the Universe's History, Epoch of Reionization, and Ice Exploration (SPHEREx) was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 11 at 11:10 p.m. ET.
Once fully deployed, the space telescope will scan the entire night sky a total of four times using 102 separate infrared sensors, allowing it to collect information on more than 450 million galaxies over its planned two-year operational period. This data set will provide scientists with important insights into some of the most significant questions in cosmology, such as how galaxies form and evolve over time, the origin of water, and the genesis of our universe.
This makes SPHEREx an ideal complement to JWST, highlighting areas of interest for deeper and more detailed study by the latter.
“Taking a picture with JWST is like taking a picture of a person,” Sean Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, told reporters at a Jan. 31 press conference. “What SPHEREx and other exploration missions can do is like going into panoramic mode, where you want to capture a large group of people and what’s behind them or around them.”
SPHEREx, which cost $488 million and took about a decade to develop, will map the universe by observing both optical and infrared light. It will orbit Earth 14.5 times a day, completing 11,000 revolutions over its lifetime, to filter infrared light from distant gas and dust clouds using a technique known as spectroscopy.
By penetrating these clouds, scientists using the cone-shaped telescope hope to create an unprecedented view of our cosmos using some of its most ancient light.
This will enable astronomers to study galaxies at different stages of their evolution; track ice floating in space to understand how life might have arisen; and even explore the period of dramatic inflation that the universe experienced shortly after the Big Bang.
“Just a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the observable universe underwent an astonishing expansion,” said Jamie Bock, principal investigator of SPHEREx at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, during a press conference. “An expansion of a trillion trillion times, and that expansion magnified tiny fluctuations smaller than an atom to the enormous cosmological scales we see today… We still don’t know what caused inflation or why it happened.”
SPHEREx isn't the only payload on board the rocket. It also carries the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) instrument, which will study how the solar corona — the sun's outer layer of plasma — spreads throughout our solar system as solar wind.
“We expect to revolutionize space weather forecasting,” Craig DeForest, a heliophysicist at Southwest Research Institute and the PUNCH mission’s principal investigator, said at a press conference Feb. 13. “We’re the first mission capable of tracking space weather events in three dimensions.”
TOPICS James Webb Space Telescope spacex
Sourse: www.livescience.com
