NASA's near-infrared space telescope 'SPHEREx' successfully launched to map more than 450 million galaxies and explore the beginning of the universe



This article, originally posted in Japanese on 17:09 Mar 12, 2025, may contains some machine-translated parts.
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NASA successfully launched the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) on March 12, 2025, a near-infrared space telescope that will create an all-sky map containing more than 450 million galaxies over four missions over two years.

NASA Launches Missions to Study Sun, Universe's Beginning - NASA

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-launches-missions-to-study-sun-universes-beginning/

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SPHEREx is a mission that was selected in February 2019 to launch a near-infrared space telescope to map the entire sky over four trips over a two-year period. The mission will use a spectrophotometer to measure the near-infrared spectrum from 0.75 to 5.0 micrometers, and survey hundreds of millions of galaxies from close to far away, including some whose light takes 10 billion years to reach Earth.



SPHEREx looks like a cone and consists of three cone-shaped photon shields that protect the telescope from the heat of the Earth and the Sun, a heat sink that dissipates heat from the instruments into space, and a spectrophotometer.



The map produced by this mission will have a color resolution far exceeding that of previous maps, with 102 different

color bands .



SPHEREx is also expected to complement the results of the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, and to discover key data that will shed light on the '

inflation ' that was the rapid expansion of the universe just after its birth. In addition, the mission is set to search for water and organic molecules, which are essential for life, in the stellar nursery, a region where stars are born from gas and dust, and in disks around stars where new planets may be forming in the Milky Way galaxy, which contains our solar system.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket was selected to launch SPHEREx. In addition, the solar wind research mission ' PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) ' scheduled for launch in June 2024 will also be launched at the same time.



The launch was postponed many times due to bad weather and other reasons, but at 12:10 on March 11, 2025 (Japan time), a Falcon 9 rocket carrying SPHEREx and PUNCH was launched from Launch Complex 4 at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Then, at 13:31 on the same day, communication was established between the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ground controller and the SPHEREx telescope. The SPHEREx telescope will undergo initial checks for about a month from here and then begin its two-year mission.



'Launching both SPHEREx and PUNCH on one rocket doubles the opportunity to do great science in space,' said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. 'Congratulations to both mission teams as they explore the cosmos from far-flung galaxies to nearby stars. We look forward to seeing the data returned in the coming years.'

'Questions like 'How did we get here?' and 'Are we the only lifeforms?' are questions that humans have asked throughout history. It's incredible that we live in a time when we have the scientific tools to answer these questions,' said SPHEREx project manager James Fanson.

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