NASA to launch Spherex Space Telescope for Sky Scanning Mission

The latest addition to NASA's Space Telescope Fleet will be launched this weekend and will soon scan the entire sky in near-infrared wavelength ranges, collecting a wealth of data on more than 450 million galaxies.

The history of the universe, the reionization epoch, and the spectrophotometer for Ice Explorer (Spherex) will be released on March 2nd on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:09 pm local time.

It carries a camera with filters that divide the light that enters like a prism and beams different parts of the spectrum into 102 separate color sensors. As the telescope pans around the sky, it slowly tightens the full image pixels pixel by pixel. This strategy allows you to use a relatively small and simple camera to do what you need to have a heavy, expensive suite of sensors, even without moving parts.

“If you slowly scan the sky slowly by moving the telescope, after a sufficient amount of time, every pixel in the sky is observed over a very wide wavelength range, giving you a coarse spectrum of every bit of the sky that has never been done before.” Richard Ellis University College London. “It's a very small space telescope, but it has some very unique features.”

Ellis says this rich dataset allows for accidental discoveries. “There's a high chance that you'll find something unexpected,” he says.

Infrared data is outside the human vision range, allowing scientists to determine the distance of objects and learn how to form galaxies. It can also be used to determine the chemical composition of an object, potentially revealing the presence of water and other important components.

The interesting stuff thrown by Spherex can be investigated in a more focused way using NASA's existing space telescope fleet.

Christopher Conseris At the University of Manchester in the UK, Spherex says it doesn't match the JWST solution or create similarly adoring images, but it says it will become a “maintainer” for scientific discovery.

“JWST can point to a part of the sky and take some big photos [and reveal] Something completely new. And Spherex really can't do the same thing,” he says. “It's going to be an analysis that takes years, and it's going to cover the sky many times.”

Spherex orbits the Earth 14.5 times a day away from the Earth's surface, completing 11,000 orbits over a two-year lifespan. Three cone-shaped shields protect the instrument from the Earth's radiant heat and interference from the sun.

The same rocket will be released on the polarimeter, another NASA mission to unify the Corona and Heliosphere Fair (punch), which will study the solar winds of the sun.