After several delays, NASA's SPHEREx launches in mission to map 450 million galaxies
A new NASA observatory launched into space Tuesday on a mission that could help scientists unravel what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
A new NASA observatory launched into space Tuesday on a mission that could help scientists unravel what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
The SPHEREx mission (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) is designed to map the entire celestial sky, studying hundreds of millions of galaxies and piecing together how the universe formed and evolved.
The launch had been postponed several times since late February to give engineers more time to assess the rocket and its components, according to NASA, and most recently because of bad weather at the launch site.
The cone-shaped spacecraft finally lifted off at roughly 8:10 p.m. PT Tuesday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Also along for the ride into orbit were four suitcase-sized satellites that NASA will deploy on a separate mission to study the sun.
The $488 million SPHEREx observatory will survey the whole sky four times over its two-year mission. Its instruments will observe the cosmos in 102 different colors, or wavelengths, which NASA has said is more than any previous mission.
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