NASA chooses SpaceX to launch SPHEREx space telescope

SpaceX has already secured a number of lucrative deals with NASA for its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, including the recently completed Commercial Crew Program. However, NASA doesn’t just use SpaceX for crewed flights. The agency has just awarded SpaceX another freight contract, this one to deploy the next SPHEREx space telescope. This instrument will sweep the entire sky for two years, but it will not start work until 2024 at the earliest.

SPHEREx is part of NASA’s Middle Class Explorers (MIDEX) program along with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and nearly a dozen other missions dating back to the early 1990s. SPHEREx is a particularly tortured acronym meaning spectro -photometer for the history of the universe, the era of reionization and Ices Explorer. This means that SHPEREx will map the sky in the near infrared, which is beyond the limit of human vision.

The total cost of SpaceX’s SPHEREx launch services is $ 98.8 million, a significant portion of the $ 395 to $ 427 million NASA is forecasting for the project. TESS is designed to observe objects up to several hundred light years away, but SPHEREx is expected to be able to scan over 300 million galaxies and 100 million stars in the Milky Way using its spectrophotometer.

The Falcon 9 is NASA’s choice to send SPHEREx into space in 2024.

SPHEREx could help scientists better understand how galaxies form and evolve. Every six months, SPHEREx will use its 20cm telescope to create a map of the entire sky in 96 bands of different colors. NASA believes that SHPEREx will be able to collect important data on the presence of water molecules and organic matter in remote regions of star formation. This will help NASA identify targets for future studies with more powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope. In particular, NASA is interested in collecting data that will clarify the “epoch of ionization,” a period in the early universe when the first stars and galaxies formed and reionized the neutral hydrogen that dominated. space at the time. SPHEREx will also look further back at the very beginning for evidence of a theorized Big Bang property called inflation.

However, even the chronically delayed Webb is expected to beat SPEREx in space. NASA has yet to begin construction of SPHEREx, which will be a joint effort of NASA JPL and Caltech. The launch is currently scheduled for June 2024 at Vandenberg Air Base.

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