15.01.2025
Media accreditation is open for the launch of two NASA missions that will explore the mysteries of our universe and Sun.
The agency is targeting late February to launch its SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) observatory, a space telescope that will create a 3D map of the entire sky to help scientists investigate the origins of our universe. NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, which will study origins of the Sun’s outflow of material, or the solar wind, also will ride to space with the telescope.
NASA and SpaceX will launch the missions aboard the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Accredited media will have the opportunity to participate in a series of prelaunch briefings and interviews with key mission personnel, including a science briefing the week of launch. NASA will communicate additional details regarding the media event schedule as the launch date approaches.
Media interested in covering the launch must apply for media accreditation. The application deadline for U.S. citizens is 11:59 p.m. EST, Thursday, Feb. 6, while international media without U.S. citizenship must apply by 11:59 p.m., Monday, Jan. 20.
NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online. For questions about accreditation, please email: ksc-media-accreditat@mail.nasa.gov. For other mission questions, please contact the newsroom at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 321-867-2468.
Para obtener información sobre cobertura en español en el Centro Espacial Kennedy o si desea solicitar entrevistas en español, comuníquese con Antonia Jaramillo: 321-501-8425, o Messod Bendayan: 256-930-1371.
Updates about spacecraft launch preparations are available on the agency’s SPHEREx blog and PUNCH blog.
The SPHEREx mission will observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies in infrared light, a range of wavelengths not visible to the human eye. With this map, SPHEREx will enable scientists to study inflation, or the rapid expansion of the universe a fraction of a second after the big bang. The observatory also will measure the collective glow from galaxies near and far, including light from hidden galaxies that individually haven’t been observed, and look for reservoirs of water, carbon dioxide, and other key ingredients for life in our home galaxy.
Launching as a rideshare with SPHEREx, the agency’s PUNCH mission is made up of four suitcase-sized satellites that will spread out around Earth’s day-night line to observe the Sun and space with a combined field of view. Working together, the four satellites will map out the region where the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, transitions to the solar wind, or the constant outflow of material from the Sun.
The SPHEREx observatory is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the Astrophysics Division within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission principal investigator is based jointly at NASA JPL and Caltech. Formerly Ball Aerospace, BAE Systems built the telescope, supplied the spacecraft bus, and performed observatory integration. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech. The SPHEREx data set will be publicly available.
The agency’s PUNCH mission is led by Southwest Research Institute’s office in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at NASA Kennedy, manages the launch service for the SPHEREx and PUNCH missions.
Quelle: NASA
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Update: 19.01.2025
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BAE Systems delivers NASA's SPHEREx Observatory for launch
BROOMFIELD, Colo., BAE Systems (LON: BA) has successfully delivered NASA's Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) Observatory to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The observatory is scheduled to launch in late February alongside NASA's Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The minimum two-year mission will conduct the first all-sky spectral surveys and gather valuable data to help answer fundamental questions about the universe.
The SPHEREx Observatory inside the BAE Systems clean room in Boulder, Colorado
SPHEREx will use an advanced imager developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to survey the entire sky in near-infrared light. Over the course of four planned surveys, the observatory will create 3D, colored maps of more than 450 million galaxies and millions of stars in the Milky Way. This data will provide the scientific community with novel insights on the formation of the universe in the moments after the Big Bang, help determine how galaxies evolve over time, and seek out water and other life-sustaining molecules in areas where planets are forming.
"The development of SPHEREx represents a remarkable collaborative effort between BAE Systems, JPL, Caltech, and numerous other institutions that helped to make this groundbreaking mission a reality," said Brian Pramann, SPHEREx program manager for BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems. "After years of complex design, manufacturing, integration and testing efforts, our team can't wait to see SPHEREx launch."
Along with its core science objectives, SPHEREx will also identify targets of interest for follow-up studies by observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope.
BAE Systems built both the spacecraft bus and telescope for the observatory, in addition to leading spacecraft integration and environmental testing for the mission. The company will also support launch operations and spacecraft commissioning. Caltech's Dr. Jamie Bock is the mission's principal investigator.
BAE Systems is proud to continue its longstanding support of NASA's astrophysics missions, including work on the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, among others.
Quelle: BAE Systems
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Update: 24.01.2025
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SwRI-led PUNCH spacecraft make final pit stop before launch
Four small suitcase-sized spacecraft, designed and built by Southwest Research Institute, have made a final Earth-side pit stop at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH, mission is sharing a ride to space with the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) observatory.
“The PUNCH mission will integrate our understanding of the Sun’s corona, the outer atmosphere visible during total solar eclipses, with the ‘solar wind’ that fills and defines the solar system,” said PUNCH Principal Investigator Dr. Craig DeForest of SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division. “Once the constellation is deployed, we’ll be able to routinely see and understand the solar wind itself, as it streams out from our star and washes over Earth.”
The PUNCH constellation of satellites is targeted to launch in late February 2025 into a polar orbit along the day-night line, so the spacecraft will remain in the sunlight with a clear view in all directions.
Three satellites will carry SwRI-developed Wide Field Imagers (WFI) — heliospheric imagers providing views from 18 to 180 solar radii, or 45 degrees, away from the Sun in the sky. The WFIs use an artificial “horizon” and deep baffles to view the very faint outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind itself.
“The instrument reduces direct sunlight by over 16 orders of magnitude or a factor of 10 million billion — the ratio between the mass of a human and the mass of a cold virus,” DeForest said. “The wide-field achromatic optics are based on the famous Nagler eyepiece design used in terrestrial telescopes.”
One satellite carries a coronagraph, the Narrow Field Imager developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab, that images the Sun’s corona continuously.
All four spacecraft are synchronized to serve as a single “virtual instrument” to capture roughly a quarter of the sky, centered on the Sun. Each spacecraft also includes a camera, developed by RAL Space, to collect three raw images, through three different polarizing filters, every four minutes. In addition, each spacecraft will produce a clear unpolarized image every eight minutes, for calibration purposes.
“When electron particles scatter sunlight, the waves of light become aligned in a particular way — this is polarized light,” DeForest said. “By measuring the light using polarizing filters similar to polarized sunglasses, PUNCH scientists can make a 3D map of the features they see throughout the corona and inner solar system.”
This new perspective will allow scientists to discern the exact trajectory and speed of coronal mass ejections as they move through the inner solar system, improving on current instruments that only measure the corona itself and cannot measure motion in three dimensions.
“The PUNCH team proved to be remarkably resilient as we successfully overcame a number of late-breaking challenges over the last several months to complete integration and environmental testing of the four observatories,” said PUNCH Project Manager Ronnie Killough. “I look forward to a successful launch!”
The Small Explorers (SMEX) program provides frequent flight opportunities for world-class scientific investigations from space using innovative, efficient approaches within the heliophysics and astrophysics science areas. In addition to leading the PUNCH science mission, SwRI will operate the four spacecraft. The PUNCH team includes the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which is building the Narrow Field Imager, and RAL Space in Oxfordshire, England, which is providing detector systems for four visible-light cameras.
Quelle: Southwest Research Institute
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Update: 2.02.2025
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NASA's new SPHEREx space telescope to launch in February — it can do what the JWST can't
"We are literally mapping the entire celestial sky in 102 infrared colors for the first time in humanity's history."
An illustration of the SPHEREx spacecraft with cosmic structures in the background. The craft's "cone" shape is halved so you can see the inside of it. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
In late February, if all goes to plan, a new character will enter NASA's space telescope epic. It's an eggshell white, conical probe named SPHEREx, which (get ready for a mouthful) stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. And, because it works with infrared light, SPHEREx is meant to reveal things even the trailblazing James Webb Space Telescope cannot.
"Taking a snapshot with JWST is like taking a picture of a person," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, told reporters on Jan. 31. "What SPHEREx and other survey missions can do is almost like going into panorama mode, when you want to catch a big group of people and the things standing behind or around them."
Launch is presently scheduled for no earlier than Feb. 27 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket — and SPHEREx won't be the only payload. As part of NASA's Launch Services Program, which connects space missions with appropriate commercial launch vehicles, SPHEREx will share its ride with the agency's PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, a constellation of four little satellites meant to study the sun. The duo will lift off from Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Central California.
"This is the third launch of this reusable booster, which was previously flown on the Transporter 12 mission on January 14," Cesar Marin, SPHEREx integration engineer for the Launch Services Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said during the briefing, referring to the Falcon 9's first stage. "The booster will be applying its phenomenal capacity of returning once again to land in zone four at Vandenberg Space Force Base about eight minutes after launch."
The promise of SPHEREx
Over two years — unless NASA decides to extend the mission — SPHEREx will map the universe while detecting two kinds of cosmic light: optical and infrared.
Optical light is visible to the human eye, and is the specialty of many telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope, while infrared light is invisible to us and is more akin to a heat signature. Infrared is the James Webb Space Telescope's speciality, and is in fact why the JWST has been so iconic in showing us things in the universe that have remained hidden for so long. It is the universe's infrared light that possesses information about the farthest reaches of space, the stars being born within blankets of dust, and the details of galactic structures that are showing scientists the cosmic equivalent of new colors.
There have indeed been other infrared eyes on the sky — like the now-retired Spitzer Telescope, and even Hubble has some capabilities in this realm — but none really match up to the JWST.
SPHEREx could, though (in a way).
To be fair, SPHEREx won't rival the JWST's ability to observe highly localized regions of the universe that are confined to the infrared section of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, unlike the JWST, it is an all-sky survey. Whereas the $10 billion JWST is great at observing things like specific nebulas and relatively narrow but tremendously dimensional deep fields, SPHEREx is intended to image the entire sky as seen from Earth.
"We are literally mapping the entire celestial sky in 102 infrared colors for the first time in humanity's history, and we will see that every six months," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "This has not been done before on this level of color resolution for our old sky maps."
"In terms of all-sky survey missions," Jamie Bock, principal investigator of SPHEREx at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said during the briefing, "generally, these have been done in photometry, looking at the sky in broad bands and handfuls of broad bands — not this complete spectrum."
The SPHEREx targets
As to what SPHEREx will be searching for? Well, considering the space telescope will be pretty much mapping everything in the sky from its special dawn-dusk sun synchronous orbit that keeps it cool enough to study infrared emissions — the list is endless.
To name a few goals, however, scientists wish to learn about lots of galaxies at various points in their histories to enhance our knowledge of galactic evolution, and they want to peer into the empty space between stars to see if there are any icy organics floating around to trace how life on Earth might have begun.
"Shout out to our team at OSIRIS-REx in the Planetary Division," Domagal-Goldman said. "They pick up that story and then tell how it traverses in our solar system to planets like our home."
Scientists also hope to capture three-dimensional views of hundreds of millions of galaxies to further our understanding of cosmic inflation —the theory that, moments after it was born, the universe experienced a mind-blowing amount of expansion. It was as though a balloon suddenly inflated.
"Literally a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the observable universe went through a remarkable expansion," Bock said, "expanding a trillion trillion fold, and that expansion expanded tiny fluctuations smaller than an atom, to enormous cosmological scales that we see today."
"We still don't know what drove inflation or why it happened," he said.
It's usually the case that different space missions benefit one another down the line, but such collaboration seems especially prevalent here. Most obviously, because the JWST is so adept at infrared imaging, it will be tremendously useful for SPHEREx to present JWST scientists with an all-sky infrared map so they'll know what areas to zero in on. And, as mentioned, the OSIRIS-REx asteroid-sampling mission (now known as OSIRIS-APEX after its new asteroid target, the notorious Apophis) is also trying to connect the dots when it comes to organics scattered across space.
We'll also see a major ground-based telescope, the Vera Rubin Observatory, see first light later this year, if all goes according to plan. Rubin will be mapping gigantic sections of the sky as well, though in different wavelengths — but that just means another filter of observations to add onto SPHEREx's maps.
"No single instrument, no one instrument, no single mission can tell us the full story of the cosmos," Domagal-Goldman said. "Those answers to the big questions like that, they come from the power of combined observations from combined observatories."
SPHEREx logistics
"SPHEREx is a testament to doing big science with a small telescope," Beth Fabinsky, deputy project manager of SPHEREx at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said during the briefing.
The team says SPHEREx costs about $488 million (excluding some costs to come) which sounds like a lot, but is rather modest in terms of space mission pricetags. That's especially true when considering what SPHEREx could ultimately offer to our scientific textbooks.
Within this budget, the spacecraft was also meticulously crafted, with attention given to several key aspects of its structure.
"It weighs about 1,100 pounds, so a little less than a grand piano, and uses about 270-300 watts of power — less than a refrigerator," Fabinsky said. "It produces more power than it needs using a thick solar array, very much like one you might have on the roof of your house."
But the most pressing concern when it comes to infrared imaging is that the instrument doing the imaging cannot be exposed to heat because that interferes with the data. "If they are too warm, they will be blinded by their own warm glow," Fabinsky said. Yet unfortunately, in space, you'll find there is one of the hottest possible objects a spacecraft can be exposed to: the sun.
SPHEREx during construction and testing. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
That's why SPHEREx's specific orbit was chosen to keep it away from sunlight, as briefly discussed; this was also a big part of the James Webb Space Telescope's construction and placement. The JWST is also in a location designed to shield it from the sun's warmth at all times, known as Lagrange Point 2.
"We have three concentric cone-shaped photon shields," Fabinsky said, explaining more about how the team plans to keep SPHEREx at appropriately frigid temperatures. "They protect the instrument enclosed in the center from sunlight and Earthshine together with three curved plates at the bottom of the payload called the V-group radiator. They help radiate heat away from the warm spacecraft beneath the payload."
Once SPHEREx is safely in space, fully deployed, and correctly booted up, the team will begin the effort to conduct the mission's first six-month survey of the sky. "The main form of data release is that we put out what we call calibrated spectral images, and those come within two months of observation," Bock said, though he emphasized that there is one specific achievement he's lasered on for the foreseeable future:
"I have to say that the moment I'm looking forward to is once we pop the lid off the telescope and take in our first image — that'll tell us everything's working as expected."
Quelle: SC
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Update: 15.02.2025
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NASA’s SPHEREx Space Telescope Will Seek Life’s Ingredients
NASA’s SPHEREx mission will survey the Milky Way galaxy looking for water ice and other key ingredients for life. In the search for these frozen compounds, the mission will focus on molecular clouds — collections of gas and dust in space — like this one imaged by the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA
Where is all the water that may form oceans on distant planets and moons? The SPHEREx astrophysics mission will search the galaxy and take stock.
Every living organism on Earth needs water to survive, so scientists searching for life outside our solar system, are often guided by the phrase “follow the water.” Scheduled to launch no earlier than Thursday, Feb. 27, NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) mission will help in that quest.
After its ride aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force base in California, the observatory will search for water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other key ingredients for life frozen on the surface of interstellar dust grains in the clouds of gas and dust where planets and stars eventually form.
While there are no oceans or lakes floating freely in space, scientists think these reservoirs of ice, bound to small dust grains, are where most of the water in our universe forms and resides. Additionally, the water in Earth’s oceans as well as those of other planets and moons in our galaxy likely originated in such locations.
The mission will focus on massive regions of gas and dust called molecular clouds. Within those, SPHEREx will also look at some newly formed stars and the disks of material around them from which new planets are born.
The Perseus Molecular Cloud, located about 1,000 light-years from Earth, was imaged by NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope. NASA’s SPHEREx mission will search the galaxy for water ice and other frozen compounds in clouds of gas and dust in space like this one.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Although space telescopes such as NASA’s James Webb and retired Spitzer have detected water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other compounds in hundreds of targets, the SPHEREx observatory is the first to be uniquely equipped to conduct a large-scale survey of the galaxy in search of water ice and other frozen compounds.
Rather than taking 2D images of a target like a star, SPHEREx will gather 3D data along its line of sight. That enables scientists to see the amount of ice present in a molecular cloud and observe how the composition of the ices throughout the cloud changes in different environments.
By making more than 9 million of these line-of-sight observations and creating the largest-ever survey of these materials, the mission will help scientists better understand how these compounds form on dust grains and how different environments can influence their abundance.
BAE Systems employees work on NASA’s SPHEREx observatory in the Astrotech Space Operations facility at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Jan. 16. Targeting a Feb. 27 launch, the mission will map the entire sky in infrared light.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Tip of the Iceberg
It makes sense that the composition of planets and stars would reflect the molecular clouds they formed in. However, researchers are still working to confirm the specifics of the planet formation process, and the universe doesn’t always match scientists’ expectations.
For example, a NASA mission launched in 1998, the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS), surveyed the galaxy for water in gas form — including in molecular clouds — but found far less than expected.
“This puzzled us for a while,” said Gary Melnick, a senior astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and a member of the SPHEREx science team. “We eventually realized that SWAS had detected gaseous water in thin layers near the surface of molecular clouds, suggesting that there might be a lot more water inside the clouds, locked up as ice.”
The mission team’s hypothesis also made sense because SWAS detected less oxygen gas (two oxygen atoms bound together) than expected. They concluded that the oxygen atoms were sticking to interstellar dust grains, and were then joined by hydrogen atoms, forming water. Later research confirmed this. What’s more, the clouds shield molecules from cosmic radiation that would otherwise break those compounds apart. As a result, water ice and other materials stored deep in a cloud’s interior are protected.
As starlight passes through a molecular cloud, molecules like water and carbon dioxide block certain wavelengths of light, creating a distinct signature that SPHEREx and other missions like Webb can identify using a technique called absorption spectroscopy.
In addition to providing a more detailed accounting of the abundance of these frozen compounds, SPHEREx will help researchers answer questions including how deep into molecular clouds ice begins to form, how the abundance of water and other ices changes with the density of a molecular cloud, and how that abundance changes once a star forms.
Powerful Partnerships
As a survey telescope, SPHEREx is designed to study large portions of the sky relatively quickly, and its results can be used in conjunction with data from targeted telescopes like Webb, which observe a significantly smaller area but can see their targets in greater detail.
“If SPHEREx discovers a particularly intriguing location, Webb can study that target with higher spectral resolving power and in wavelengths that SPHEREx cannot detect,” said Melnick. “These two telescopes could form a highly effective partnership.”
More About SPHEREx
SPHEREx is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive.
Quelle: NASA