After weeks of preparation, the Space Observatory has begun a scientific mission, shooting about 3,600 unique images every day to create maps of the universe.
NASA's Spherex Space Observatory was launched on March 11 and over the past six weeks, checkout, calibration and other activities are conducted to ensure it's due to work. Now, it plots the entire sky (not just a large part of it) to plot the locations of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to answer some big questions about the universe. On May 1, the spacecraft began regular scientific works, including about 3,600 images taken every day for the next two years to provide new insights into the origins of the universe, galaxies and raw materials for life.
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“Thanks to the hard work of NASA, industry and academia that built this task, Spherex works as we expected and will produce a complete sky map, unlike before,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of NASA Headquarters in Washington, Astrophysics Division. “This new observatory is adding a series of space astrophysics survey missions, leading to the launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope. Along with these other missions, Spherex will play a key role in answering big questions about the cosmic problems we solve every day on NASA.”
From the perch of Earth's orbit, Spherex aims at the darkness, pointing to the Earth and the Sun. The Observatory will complete more than 11,000 orbits in a planned 25-month planned survey operation, orbiting the Earth about 14.5 times a day. It orbits the Earth from north to south, passing through the poles, and takes images of a circular belt along the sky every day. As the days pass, the earth moves around the sun, and Spherex's field of vision changes with it, so six months later, the observatory will look into space in all directions.
When Spherex takes pictures of the sky, it sends light to six detectors, each producing a unique image to capture different wavelengths of light. These six images are called exposures, and Spherex requires approximately 600 exposures per day. When completed in one exposure, the entire observatory moves position – the mirror and detector don’t move like on other telescopes. Instead of using thrusters, Spherex relies on a reaction wheel system that rotates inside the spacecraft to control its direction.
Hundreds of thousands of Spherex images will be woven together digitally to create four full maps in two years. By drawing the entire sky, the mission will provide new insights into what happened in the first second after the Big Bang. In a brief moment, an event called cosmic inflation caused the universe to expand by trillions of times.
"We're going to look at what happens on the smallest size scale at the earliest moments of the universe, and look at the modern universe at the largest scale," said Jim Fanson, Mission program manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "I think it's a poetic arc."
Cosmic inflation cleverly influences the distribution of matter in the universe, and clues about how such events occur write to the galaxy locations throughout the universe. When the inflation of the universe began, the universe was smaller than the size of the atoms, but the characteristics of the early universe stretched out and affected what we saw today. There are no other known events or processes that involve the amount of energy required to drive the inflation of the universe, so studying it provides a unique opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of how our universe works.
“Some of us have been working towards this goal for 12 years,” said Jamie Bock, chief investigator for California and JPL missions. "The performance of the instrument is as good as we hoped. This means we will be able to complete all the amazing science we plan and even get some unexpected discoveries."
The Spherex Observatory won't be the first to draw the entire sky, but this will be the first to do it in multiple colors. It observes infrared light of 102 wavelengths or colors, which cannot be detected by the human eye. Through a technique called spectroscopy, the telescope divides light into wavelengths—just like a prism produces a rainbow from the sun—reveals various information about the origin of the universe.
For example, spectroscopy can be used to determine the distance to distant galaxies, and this information can be used to transform the 2D mapping of these galaxies into 3D. The technology will also enable the mission to measure collective glow from all galaxies that once existed and to understand how cosmic time changes.
The spectrum can reveal the composition of an object. With this feature, the task is to find water and other key components in these systems in our galaxy. It is believed that water in the Earth's oceans originates from frozen water molecules in dust in interstellar clouds formed by sunlight.
The Spherex mission will observe more than 9 million interstellar clouds in the way of the Milky Way, map these materials throughout the Milky Way, and help scientists understand how different conditions affect the chemical reactions that produce many of the compounds on Earth today.
Spherex Mission is managed by JPL, the agency’s astrophysics division within the NASA headquarters’ Science Mission Bureau. The BAE system in Boulder, Colorado built the telescope and spacecraft bus. Scientific analysis of Spherex data will be conducted by two teams of scientists located in 10 institutions in the United States, while scientific analysis will be conducted in Taiwan. The Caltech in Pasadena manages and integrates the tool. The mission's chief investigator is headquartered at Caltech and has jointly appointed the JPL appointment. The data will be processed and archived on CalTech's IPAC. The Spherex dataset will be publicly available at the NASA-IPAC Infrared Science Archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about Spherex, please visit:
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
2025-063