A rocket launches from California
The new SPHEREx telescope and PUNCH satellites took off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on March 11. SpaceX
NASA’s newest space telescope, called SPHEREx, finally got off the ground this week, after a series of delays that had stalled its launch since late February. From low-Earth orbit, it will gather data on millions of stars and galaxies—and search for the ingredients of life. The telescope was joined by PUNCH, a collection of four satellites that will study how the sun’s outer atmosphere becomes a stream of charged particles in solar wind.
The two missions took off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Tuesday night at 11:10 p.m. Eastern time.
“Everything in NASA science is interconnected, and sending both SPHEREx and PUNCH up on a single rocket doubles the opportunities to do incredible science in space,” says Nicky Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. “Congratulations to both mission teams as they explore the cosmos, from far-out galaxies to our neighborhood star. I am excited to see the data returned in the years to come.”
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The Falcon 9 rocket launch was initially plagued by delays. Its launch window first opened February 28, but engineers needed more time to assess the rocket’s components. NASA and SpaceX chose to delay a launch scheduled for March 8 to “allow teams to continue rocket checkouts ahead of liftoff,” per a NASA statement. Then, on March 10, the launch was once again postponed because of bad weather. But the teams overcame these issues on Tuesday.
“I am so happy that we’re finally in space!” says Farah Alibay, the lead flight system engineer for SPHEREx at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, per Space.com’s Monisha Ravisetti. “It feels really great to have SPHEREx in space.”
SPHEREx is a nickname for the telescope’s full, clunky title: the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. The cone-shaped telescope will create three-dimensional maps of the entire celestial sky in 102 colors of infrared light, more than any other mission to date.
“It’s really the first of its kind,” says Olivier Doré, the NASA mission’s project scientist, to Katrina Miller at the New York Times.
The telescope will search for information on the earliest moments of the cosmos and the ingredients for life in space. “SPHEREx is really trying to get at the origins of the universe—what happened in those very few first instants after the Big Bang,” explains Phil Korngut, a SPHEREx instrument scientist with Caltech, to Will Dunham at Reuters. Within the Milky Way, it will look for reservoirs of frozen water in clouds of gas and dust.
The telescope will spend two years in space, and by the end of that time, it will have surveyed the whole sky four times. “We’ll have spectra of every kind of celestial object—planets, stars, comets, asteroids, galaxies,” Doré adds to the New York Times. “And every time we look at the sky in a different way, we discover new phenomena.”
PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere), for its part, will spend two years studying the sun’s outer atmosphere to better understand solar winds, which play a key role in triggering space weather events that might damage satellites or produce auroras.
The measurements “will provide scientists with new information about how these potentially disruptive events form and evolve,” according to a statement from NASA. “This could lead to more accurate and crucial predictions about the arrival of space weather events [on] Earth and their impact on humanity’s robotic explorers in space.”