Today, NASA will be launching a new space observatory into orbit as the space agency looks to use it for a new mission to map more than 450 million galaxies in the night sky.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, will soon begin its lofty goal of mapping the entire sky four times over the next two years.
Through this mission, NASA is hoping to answer the age-old question: How did the universe come to be?
“It’s going to answer a fundamental question: How did we get here?” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the acting director of the astrophysics division at NASA headquarters, said at a press conference.
Scheduled to lift off on Thursday night, the $488 million SPHEREx mission is planning on providing astronomers with new information as it maps the sky in 102 infrared colors. According to NASA, this project has been in the making for the last decade and will do what no other mission has done.
The cone-shaped observatory will take off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Four suitcase-sized satellites will also deploy at the same time, but they will be on a separate mission that will look to study the sun.
The infrared instruments that will be utilized in space will help the observatory see past dust and gas to some of the universe’s oldest galaxies and their stars. Scientists will then use spectroscopy to split the infrared light from stars and galaxies into different colors, allowing them to better understand their characteristics, compositions, density, and more.
Jamie Bock, a principal investigator of the SPHEREx mission as well as a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, shared that the observations made using the SPHEREx observatory could unlock answers about the formation of a galaxy. It may also help scientists understand the origin of water and other organic materials.
“In splitting up the light, we can use that to determine the distance to galaxies, to build up that three-dimensional map, and we also see the fingerprints of water,” Bock said.
These clues, as well as others, unlocked in the observatory’s findings, could help scientists better understand the evolution of life as well as answer other questions about the universe.
“This is a new capability, and with any new capability comes the potential for discoveries and surprises,” Bock said.