By Mary O’KEEFE

Last week CVW reported on the SPHEREx team from NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).  Although the ringing of the NYSE bell is normally reserved for listed companies, it does invite other organizations and/or events that are noteworthy. SPHEREx fell into that category.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer – or SPHEREx – is a two-year telescope mission that will survey the sky in optical as well as near-infrared light which, though not visible to the human eye, serves as a powerful tool for answering cosmic questions, according to JPL/NASA.

SPHEREx will survey hundreds of millions of galaxies near and far, and images have already started coming to Earth. 

“We are very happy with what are seeing,” said Olivier Doré, project scientist for SPHEREx. He added SPHEREx is performing pretty much exactly as the team expected. The key analysis of images will take some time; however, what the team is seeing is impressive.

When asked if he has seen anything that surprised him, even though the mission has just begun, he replied, “I guess the surprise is that we can look at the sky, look at the Milky Way, look at our own galaxy with a lot of colors of the spectrum – 102 colors. By doing that we can really map the sky.”

SPHEREx launched on March 11 from Vandenberg Space Force Base on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and it is now collecting data on more than 450 million galaxies and 100 million stars in the Milky Way. The goals are to improve the understanding of how the universe evolved and search for key ingredients for life in the Earth’s galaxy. 

SPHEREx is a telescope that is pointed away from the Earth into the universe. The sky that will be mapped is therefore beyond the Earth. Up until now, scientists have only been able to map a small part of the sky but with this new mission they will not only be able to map the galaxies but the images will be in color. 

“That’s really what’s unique about SPHEREx,” Doré added.

SPHEREx will be looking at how galaxies are distributed over the entire sky and, with the ability of using the 102 colors, the team can make a map of the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies. 

“We can really learn something about the very first moments of the universe, when the universe was a fraction of a second old,” Doré said. “So you can say we are probing the origin of the universe in novel ways. Another big question we are probing is the formation of the first stars and the first galaxies.” 

They will also be looking at the origin of life. 

“Life as we know it on Earth,” he said.

The mission will expand the knowledge of the universe and will also be beneficial to human space exploration. Since the plan is to not only visit other planets in the future but to actually occupy those planets, it is always good to have a well made, advanced map to guide the journey. 

The images are available for all to view at https://spherex.caltech.edu/images.