The future of space exploration looks to grow even brighter as the launch of NASA’s highly anticipated SPHEREx mission lies right on the horizon. The mission, set to launch the evening of March 4, 2025 will survey the vast expanse of space for the next two years to construct an unprecedented map of the sky.
NASA is ready to tackle the universe’s most pressing questions with Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx). Launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket out of the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the telescope will not only chronicle the history of the universe by identifying galaxies billions of light years away from Earth, but it will also carry out an important search closer to home as it combs through the Milky Way for signs of water and organic molecules.
A Colorful Sky Map
In its venture to study the universe, the SPHEREx space telescope will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies, along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way alone. To accomplish this feat, the telescope will use observations in optical and near-infrared light.
Visible light makes up a small segment of the electromagnetic spectrum and is the only part the human eye can see. Near-infrared light, on the other hand, exists just beyond the scope of what is visible to us.
The longer wavelengths of infrared light are better suited to pass through particles, especially dense regions of gas and dust in space. Because of this, infrared telescopes have become an integral tool for viewing hidden pockets of space that we usually couldn’t see with optical telescopes.
Every six months while in space, SPHEREx will build a detailed map of the entire sky in 102 different infrared colors through spectroscopy — this technique will render light from stars and galaxies into individual colors, similar to how a prism makes a rainbow when hit with sunlight.
Exploring the Early Universe
Infrared light also gives scientists a glimpse of faraway galaxies, which may help them piece together the growth of the universe in its early history. One of the key objectives of SPHEREx is to uncover evidence of cosmic inflation, which entails a theory describing how the universe may have expanded faster than the speed of light for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Somewhere out in the distant universe, leftover cosmic ripples from this event could hold answers.
SPHEREx will look back at another era of the universe’s history, called the “epoch of reionization.” During this period, starting a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, ultraviolet light from the earliest stars caused the atoms of gas in the universe to lose their electrons. Studying this era could provide insight into the early formation of stars and galaxies.
Read More: Did the Big Bang Happen More Than Once?
In Pursuit of Water
In our own Milky Way, SPHEREx will scan regions of space gas and dust, called molecular clouds, to find water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients of life. With prior help from the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have deduced that molecules for these ingredients take on the form of interstellar ice that adheres to grains of gas and dust.
Delving into molecular clouds, where stars and planets begin to take shape, SPHEREx will look for water ice and other frozen compounds. Scientists hope this effort will make progress in addressing questions about how ice forms in these clouds and what effect star formation might have on the process. The answers may even lead us to a better understanding of how Earth got its oceans and grew to sustain life in the first place.
Read More: Lunar Trailblazer and IM-2 Will Depart for the Moon in Search of Water
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Jack Knudson is an assistant editor at Discover with a strong interest in environmental science and history. Before joining Discover in 2023, he studied journalism at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University and previously interned at Recycling Today magazine.
