Context: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is scheduled to launch its new space telescope SPHEREx on February 28, 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from California, the US.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: Key facts about SPHEREx Telescope.
SPHEREx Telescope
- SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionisation, and Ices Explorer) is a planned two-year mission that will survey the sky in optical as well as near-infrared light.
- Key Objectives:
- Create a 3D survey/map of the entire sky
- Investigate cosmic inflation
- Location: Sun-synchronous Low Earth Orbit.
Key Features
- SPHEREx is equipped with a prism-like spectrophotometer that splits light into 102 colours and enables it to detect faint cosmic structures.
- It will scan the entire sky twice a year and conduct its 3D survey.
- It will map more than 450 million galaxies and over 100 million stars in the Milky Way.
- It will investigate cosmic inflation — a period of rapid expansion that occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
Significance
- 3D map of entire Sky:
- The mission will create a map of the entire sky in 102 different colour bands, far exceeding the colour resolution of previous all-sky maps.
- It also will identify targets for more detailed study by future missions, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
- Identify Distribution of Essential Molecules:
- SPHEREx will locate frozen water and biogenic molecules — such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur — in interstellar clouds across the Milky Way.
- Cataloging the location of these essential molecules will provide a deeper understanding of their distribution, and determine how these frozen compounds survive and accumulate over time.
- Evolution of Universe:
- Better understand the elusive physics that propelled cosmic inflation (the nearly instantaneous ballooning of space within the first second after the Big Bang).
- Planetary Formation:
- SPHEREx will examine newly formed stars and protoplanetary disks surrounding them to understand how water and biogenic molecules transition from interstellar clouds into developing planetary systems.
The findings of SPHEREx Telescope will complement the findings of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which detects near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths to observe faint and distant objects.