Nasa’s Spherex observatory has launched on a SpaceX rocket from California, embarking on a mission to map the entire sky in unprecedented detail.
The $488 million telescope will survey hundreds of millions of galaxies and their combined cosmic glow, offering insights into the universe’s evolution since the Big Bang.
Spherex, weighing 1,110 pounds (500 kilograms), will orbit Earth over the poles at an altitude of 400 miles (650 kilometers). Over two years, it will complete four full-sky surveys using infrared vision and a wide field of view.
This approach differs from the Hubble and Webb telescopes, which focus on individual galaxies in greater detail. Spherex will instead observe the total light emitted by all galaxies, including the earliest ones formed after the Big Bang.
The mission’s objectives include understanding how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe expanded so rapidly in its initial moments.
Closer to home, within our Milky Way galaxy, Spherex will search for water and other building blocks of life in the icy clouds where new solar systems are born.
The mission also deployed four suitcase-sized satellites to study the sun.
Spherex is expected to begin its sky mapping in six months.
“This cosmological glow captures all light emitted over cosmic history,” said the mission’s chief scientist Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology.
“It’s a very different way of looking at the universe,” enabling scientists to see what sources of light may have been missed in the past.
By observing the collective glow, scientists hope to tease out the light from the earliest galaxies and learn how they came to be, Bock said.
“We won’t see the Big Bang. But we’ll see the aftermath from it and learn about the beginning of the universe that way,” he said.
The telescope’s infrared detectors will be able to distinguish 102 colors invisible to the human eye, yielding the most colorful, inclusive map ever made of the cosmos.
It’s like “looking at the universe through a set of rainbow-colored glasses,” said deputy project manager Beth Fabinsky of Nasas Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
To keep the infrared detectors super cold — minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 210 degrees Celsius) — Spherex has a unique look. It sports three aluminum-honeycomb cones, one inside the other, to protect from the sun and Earth’s heat, resembling a 10-foot (3-meter) shield collar for an ailing dog.
Besides the telescope, SpaceX’s Falcon rocket provided a lift from Vandenberg Space Force Base for a quartet of Nasa satellites called Punch. From their own separate polar orbit, the satellites will observe the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, and the resulting solar wind.
The evening launch was delayed for two weeks because of rocket and other issues.
