In its next mission, NASA will map the entire sky in search for the building blocks of life
Later this month, NASA plans to launch its new space telescope, named SPHEREx, which will improve astronomers’ understanding of how life on Earth might have begun.
SPHEREx – which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer – will search for key ingredients for life across our galaxy.
It will launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which will also have NASA’s PUNCH mission in tow – satellites that will study solar wind to better understand the Sun, wind and Earth as a connected system.
On Friday (February 21), the space agency announced that NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 10.09 pm EST (3.09 am GMT) on Friday, February 28 for the launch. SPHEREx and PUNCH will blast off from a launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, US.
What will SPHEREx be looking for?
According to NASA, “the SPHEREx mission will improve our understanding of what happened in the first second after the big bang and search for key ingredients for life in our galaxy.”
But what does this mean? Over its two year mission, SPHEREx will map the universe and detect two kinds of light: optical light, which is visible to the human eye, and infrared, which humans can only detect as heat.
Infrared energy can reveal objects in the universe that cannot be seen in visible light using optical telescopes, according to NASA. This is why humanity’s most powerful telescope, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), has been revealing things throughout its mission that astronomers have never seen before, like a spectacular unseen star collection and, more recently, a mysterious ‘cosmic firework display’.
The SPHEREx space telescope will be mapping everything in the sky, so the limits to what it’s searching for are endless. Unlike JWST, which can only see 40 per cent of the sky at any one position, it will image the entire sky as seen from Earth, potentially revealing things James Webb has not.
“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 January 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.”
What could SPHEREx reveal?
The ambitious mission will sit in low Earth orbit and survey more than 450 million galaxies and more than 100 million stars within our Milky Way galaxy, NASA says. By analysing the light these celestial objects give off, SPHEREx seeks to uncover the origins of the universe, how galaxies formed, and the presence of essential ingredients for life, such as water and organic molecules.
Recently, NASA scientists discovered the building blocks for life, minerals and organic compounds, on samples scooped from an asteroid called Bennu. Perhaps we could expect more of where that came from after SPHEREx’s mission.
The mission will hunt for these essential building blocks in stellar nurseries, regions where stars are born from gas and dust, as well as disks around stars, where new planets could form.
Every six months, NASA says SPHEREx will survey the entire sky to create a map with a colour resolution far exceeding all other sky maps produced by space telescopes.
“Its all-sky map will help scientists answer major questions about why the large-scale structure of the universe looks the way it does, how galaxies form and evolve, and the origins and abundance of water and other key ingredients for life in our galaxy,” the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) wrote.
