Excitement is building for next month’s launch of NASA’s SPHEREx mission, which will survey the sky in optical and near-infrared light from low-Earth orbit.
NASA has just released a video (below) offering a behind-the-scenes look at the mission, with the team members revealing some of the rigorous testing processes that have been necessary to get the space telescope ready for launch.
Short for “Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer,” SPHEREx will “look back int time” to see what happened in the first moments after the big bang. A powerful space telescope is able to do this because light from distant celestial objects takes millions — or billions — of years to reach Earth, allowing us to observe these objects as they appeared in the distant past when that light first began its journey.
The mission will also seek to understand how galaxies have evolved throughout history, and search for water and other basic ingredients for life.
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The SPHEREx comprises two main sections — the bottom half is the spacecraft with the onboard computer, telecom system, solar array, and other parts, while the top half is the payload, which includes the BAE Systems-built telescope and also the cones that act as thermal shields to keep the observatory cool.
“The SPHEREx telescope and the detectors are required to be very temperature-stable during their observations in order to collect that science data, and they lend this very distinctive structure to a spacecraft, one that I haven’t seen before in my career,” said Brian Pramann, SPHEREx program manager at BAE Systems.
The video also features footage from a thermal vacuum chamber — the one at BAE is called Titan.
“It’s a special chamber where we can lock in the spacecraft, pull out the atmosphere, and mimic the vacuum of space,” explained Farah Alibay, a system engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is overseeing the two-year mission. “It also can mimic the hot and the cold of space. So if you can imagine when SPHEREx is orbiting Earth, it’s going to see the sun but also eclipses, so it gets really hot and really cold, and we can mimic all of that in that special chamber.”
Watch the video to learn more about four other vital tests that SPHEREx has to undergo ahead of launch.
Regarding the upcoming mission, Alibay said she’s “most looking forward to is those first few images that we’re going to get from SPHEREx once it’s on orbit. Whenever you see those beautiful images of space, it makes all of the pain and the long days really worth it.”
As for Pramann, he’s hoping for “a successful mission with data products that the science community can use to advance our understanding of the world and the universe that we live in,” adding, “Being able to see basically back in time, it’s cool. It’s like time travel, right?”
NASA is targeting February 27 for the launch of the SPHEREx space telescope, which will lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.