Two missions were launched from California on Tuesday night, including NASA’s SPHEREx telescope and the four satellites of the PUNCH mission. SPHEREx is a telescope designed to study the origins of the universe and search for hidden reservoirs of water in the Milky Way galaxy. The telescope, which has been years in development, launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with the PUNCH mission to study the sun’s outer atmosphere.
SPHEREx will begin its two-year mission to observe hundreds of millions of galaxies and over 100 million stars in the Milky Way in search of clues about the universe’s origins and signs of extraterrestrial life. The PUNCH mission will study how the sun’s outer atmosphere transitions into solar wind to better understand space weather events like coronal mass ejections.
SPHEREx is an advanced observatory with infrared capabilities that will create a 3D map of the entire celestial sky every six months. Additionally, it will measure the glow of galaxies to provide insights into how they formed and evolved. The telescope will also search for frozen water ice and other essential molecules in the Milky Way.
NASA believes that SPHEREx will complement other telescopes like the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes by providing a wider view of the galaxy and identifying scientific objects of interest for further study. This will help scientists gain a more complete perspective of the universe. The successful launch of SPHEREx and PUNCH on a single rocket has doubled the opportunities for groundbreaking scientific discoveries in space.
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