NASA’s SPHEREx to provide first all-sky spectral survey; launch set for 2025

NASA has approved final plans for all the components of SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), the agency's upcoming mission that will scan the entire sky every six months to answer big questions about the universe.

The mission is slated for launch no later than April 2025 and will probe what happened within the first second after the big bang, how galaxies form and evolve and the prevalence of molecules critical to the formation of life, like water, locked away as ice in our galaxy.

The observatory will collect data on more than 300 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in our Milky Way galaxy in order to explore the origins of the universe.

"The design for the spacecraft, as it stands, is confirmed. We have shown that it’s doable down to the smallest details. So now we can really start building and putting things together," said Allen Farrington, SPHEREx project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

While NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed about 0.1% of the sky in more than 30 years of its operations, SPHEREx will scan over 99% of the sky every six months to create a map of the entire sky in 96 different color bands, far exceeding the color resolution of previous all-sky maps.

Scientists will use this survey telescope to measure the prevalence of life-sustaining materials like water that reside in icy dust grains in the galactic clouds from which new stars and their planetary systems are born.

A new cosmic mapmaker is in the works✨The SPHEREx mission will scan the sky every 6 months to create a map of the cosmos unlike any done before. @NASA approved final plans for the observatory’s components & it's slated for launch no later than April 2025 https://t.co/DerNT9jXX2 pic.twitter.com/YZC65hbcmH

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) March 24, 2022