Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA will survey the entire sky with its SPHEREx observatory

Georgina Torbet
By

NASA is ramping up plans for a new sky survey tool that could help unravel some of the biggest mysteries about the origin of the universe.

Exploring Cosmic Origins with NASA’s SPHEREx

The mission, called SPHEREx or Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, is set to launch by April 2025 and will investigate big questions in cosmology, such as what happened in the first few seconds after the Big Bang and how the universe developed and evolved. To investigate these issues, the mission is different from telescopes like Hubble which look at individual stars or galaxies. Instead, SPHEREx is a type of mission called a survey telescope, which looks at the entire sky. That enables it to see information about the universe on a large scale.

Illustration of NASA’s SPHEREx spacecraft.
Illustration of NASA’s SPHEREx spacecraft. NASA/JPL-Caltech

“It’s the difference between getting to know a few individual people, and doing a census and learning about the population as a whole,” said Beth Fabinsky, deputy project manager for SPHEREx at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in a statement. “Both types of studies are important, and they complement each other. But there are some questions that can only be answered through that census.”

SPHEREx uses different hardware from telescopes like Hubble and James Webb as well. Instead of having a very large mirror that can focus on very distant objects, it will have a primary mirror just 8 inches across. But it will be able to scan 99% of the sky every six months, which is far faster than these other telescopes. Like Webb, SPHEREx will look in the infrared wavelength and will use an instrument called a spectrometer which breaks down light to see what distant objects are composed of.

With the concept for the mission pinned down, now the team is working on getting the hardware ready for space. “We’re at the transition from doing things with computer models to doing things with real hardware,” said Allen Farrington, SPHEREx project manager at JPL. “The design for the spacecraft, as it stands, is confirmed. We have shown that it’s doable down to the smallest details. So now we can really start building and putting things together.”

The mission has faced delays due to covid, but the aim is to launch SPHEREx into low-Earth orbit by 2025 at the latest.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Astronomers share early images from James Webb’s galaxy survey
Images of four example galaxies selected from the first epoch of COSMOS-Web NIRCam observations, highlighting the range of structures that can be seen. In the upper left is a barred spiral galaxy; in the upper right is an example of a gravitational lens, where the mass of the central galaxy is causing the light from a distant galaxy to be stretched into arcs; on the lower left is nearby galaxy displaying shells of material, suggesting it merged with another galaxy in its past; on the lower right is a barred spiral galaxy with several clumps of active star formation.

One of the major aims of the James Webb Space Telescope is to observe some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, and to do that it needs to be able to see extremely distant objects. But looking at a particular very old galaxy in detail is only half of the problem. To truly understand the earliest stages of the universe, astronomers also need to see how these very old galaxies are distributed so they can understand the large-scale structure of the universe.

That's the aim of the COSMOS-Web program, which is using James Webb to survey a wide area of the sky and look for these rare, ancient galaxies. It aims to study up to 1 million galaxies during over 255 hours of observing time, using both Webb's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and its mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) camera. While there is still plenty of observing left to do, the researchers in the COSMOS-Web program recently shared some of their first results.

Read more
Water was present in our solar system before the sun formed
This artist’s impression shows the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. In the outermost part of the disc water is frozen out as ice and therefore can’t be easily detected. An outburst of energy from the star heats the inner disc to a temperature where water is gaseous, enabling astronomers to detect it. The inset image shows the two kinds of water molecules studied in this disc: normal water, with one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, and a heavier version where one hydrogen atom is replaced with deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen.

You might assume that there has always been water on Earth -- that water was there from the very beginning when our planet formed. But scientists increasingly think that water on Earth may have originated elsewhere, and been carried here by comets. However, the water in the comets had to come from somewhere, and astronomers recently made a discovery which could shed light on how that water was found in the solar system.

The researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope array in Chile, to study a planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis, looking for water there to see how it would be transported as the disk evolves into planets.

Read more
Hubble captures a messy irregular galaxy which hosted a supernova
The irregular spiral galaxy NGC 5486 hangs against a background of dim, distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The tenuous disk of the galaxy is threaded through with pink wisps of star formation, which stand out from the diffuse glow of the galaxy’s bright core.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a dramatic spiral galaxy called NGC 5486, which is shot through with wisps of pink showing regions where new stars are being born.

Located 110 million light-years away in the famous constellation of Ursa Major, this galaxy is a type called an irregular spiral galaxy because its arms are wandering and indistinct. If you compare the image of this galaxy to one of a quintessential spiral galaxy like NGC 2336, you'll see that a non-irregular spiral galaxy has clearly defined arms that reach out from its center and are symmetrical.

Read more