NASA's New Space Telescope Will Map the Entire Sky

NASA's newest space telescope has rocketed toward orbit to map the entire sky like never before—a sweeping look at hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow since the beginning of time. SpaceX launched the SPHEREx—Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer—observatory from California on Tuesday, putting it on course to fly over Earth's poles, the AP reports.

• The $488 million SPHEREx mission aims to explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments. Closer to home in our own Milky Way galaxy, SPHEREx will hunt for water and other ingredients of life in the icy clouds between stars where new solar systems emerge.

• The cone-shaped SPHEREx will take six months to map the entire sky with its infrared eyes and wide field of view. Four full-sky surveys are planned over two years, as the telescope circles the globe from pole to pole 400 miles up.
• SPHEREx will map 450 million galaxies, NBC News reports, but it won't see galaxies in exquisite detail like NASA's larger and more elaborate Hubble and Webb space telescopes, with their narrow fields of view. Instead of focusing on galaxies, SPHEREx will observe the total glow produced by them, including the earliest ones formed in the wake of the universe-creating Big Bang.
• "This cosmological glow captures all light emitted over cosmic history," says the mission's chief scientist, Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology. "It's a very different way of looking at the universe," enabling scientists to see what sources of light may have been missed in the past.

• By observing the collective glow, scientists hope to tease out the light from the earliest galaxies and learn how they came to be, Bock says. "We won't see the Big Bang. But we'll see the aftermath from it and learn about the beginning of the universe that way," he says. The telescope's infrared detectors will be able to distinguish 102 colors invisible to the human eye, yielding the most colorful, inclusive map ever made of the cosmos.
• Bock says the hunt for water in our galaxy could detect areas with the key ingredients for life and provide clues to how life evolved on Earth, NBC reports. "This is a new capability, and with any new capability comes the potential for discoveries and surprises," he says.

(More NASA stories.)