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@ Chuck Darwin
2025-03-01 16:53:28
A modest NASA space telescope with grand ambitions is scheduled to soon launch into an orbit around Earth.
The megaphone-shaped spacecraft, called SPHEREx
— short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer
— is scheduled to share a ride atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday (March 4) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
"I'm the most jazzed about the all-sky nature of the observatory
— SPHEREx will be looking at the entire sky!"
Keighley Rockcliffe, a postdoc at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
who's studying exoplanet atmospheres at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com.
The space telescope is designed to do so with unmatched clarity, gathering a big-picture view that will help scientists tackle questions about the origin of the universe itself,
the galaxies within yeah
and life's essential ingredients wafting in our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
A key science goal for the SPHEREx mission is to pinpoint the locations of life's basic ingredients nestled within vast regions of gas and dust known as molecular clouds,
where stars and planets form.
To accomplish this, the telescope is equipped with a prism-like spectrophotometer to "see" in wavelengths invisible to the human eye,
which will allow it to illuminate millions of stars and galaxies for scientists in more than a hundred infrared colors.
"This is key to the mission's search for water and other life-associated molecules and compounds," Rockcliffe said.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/from-interstellar-dust-to-life-beyond-earth-why-scientists-cant-wait-nasas-new-spherex-space-telescope