SpaceX launches NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions - VIDEO
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lit up the skies tonight at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, successfully launching NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope and PUNCH solar probes.
At 11:10 p.m. EST (0310 GMT on March 12), the two missions began their journey to their orbital destinations, News.Az reports, citing Space.com.
The launch brought excitement to mission control, with team members celebrating the milestone, while onlookers cheered and scientists behind the missions expressed a mixture of relief and anticipation as their groundbreaking work took flight.
"I am so happy that we're finally in space!" said Farah Alibay, the lead flight system engineer on SPHEREx at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It feels really great to have SPHEREx in space."
This launch follows an unexpected string of several delays, unfortunate setbacks such as the devastating California wildfires that affected several mission members, and general turmoil at the agency that has been making headlines recently. And, additionally, the combined promise of SPHEREx and PUNCH is huge, both metaphorically and literally. (The integrated SPHEREx and PUNCH stack weighed around 1,667 pounds, or 756 kilograms).
Some of the anticipation surrounding the $488 million SPHEREx mission mirrors what we saw on Christmas Day in 2021, when scientists launched the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) toward its spaceborne destination of Lagrange Point 2 — and for good reason.
Like the JWST, SPHEREx — which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer — works with infrared wavelengths, which are invisible to human eyes. They're more akin to heat signatures; firefighters, for instance, use infrared wavelength detectors when figuring out where fires are concentrated in a target building.
Other telescopes, to be fair, have had infrared abilities, such as the now-retired Spitzer telescope and even the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite enough to match up to the prowess of the JWST and SPHEREx. There are other benefits of infrared wavelengths too; for instance, they can help scientists see behind blankets of dust covering budding stars and decode intricacies of exoplanetary atmospheres.
There is a difference between the JWST and SPHEREx, though — a key one. The JWST is more adept at creating extremely dimensional views of small sections of sky, while the 8.5-foot-tall (2.6-meter), conical SPHEREx telescope is built to take a more wide-field approach. "We are literally mapping the entire celestial sky in 102 infrared colors for the first time in humanity's history," Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a conference about the mission on Jan. 31.
The next steps for SPHEREx, now that it has entered space, involve successfully traveling to its selected orbit — a polar orbit that's "sun-synchronous," which means the spacecraft's position relative to the sun remains consistent. This kind of orbit is important for the mission because SPHEREx must be kept protected from the sun's heat at all times; recall how infrared wavelengths are like heat signatures. Heat interference would seriously mess up the telescope's data (the JWST's L2 station is also perfectly protected from solar heat).
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