Update: The launch has been moved to Thursday, March 4. NASA states, “The teams need additional time to evaluate launch vehicle hardware data.” The article has been updated accordingly.
This coming week sees the launch of a new NASA astrophysics mission, SPHEREx. This space telescope will investigate the origins of the universe, looking at how everything that exists went from being a tiny dot in the milliseconds after the big bang to being trillions of times that size.
The SPHEREx mission will launch using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Friday night.
This launch is notable in that it doesn’t contain just one NASA mission, but two, as alongside the SPHEREx spacecraft the rocket will also carry a set of four small spacecraft to study the sun called PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere). Both missions are heading into low-Earth orbit, so launching them together saves money and resources, as well as making extra excitement for keen space viewers.
“This is basically two for the two for the price of one,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, in a press conference.
Once launched, SPHEREx has an ambitious mission: to observe the entire sky in hundreds of wavelengths within the infrared, to survey where galaxies are located on a large scale. By tracking these positions backwards, this will give scientists information about the first seconds of the universe immediately after the big bang, and show how the universe evolved over time.
SPHEREx is primarily designed for research in astrophysics, which studies the universe on a grand scale. While telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope take detailed images of distant objects, SPHEREx will take views of large areas of the sky to give broader context to some of the specific objects studied by Webb.
“We have the pleasure of answering three big questions in astrophysics: How does the universe work? How did we get here within that universe? And are we alone in that Universe?” said Domagal-Goldman. “Those are big enough questions where we can’t answer them with one instrument. We can’t even answer them with one mission. We need a full fleet to do that, and every time we fly a new telescope we make sure that it adds to that fleet in ways that are unique from everything we’ve built before.”
The SPHEREx launch is scheduled for 10:09 p.m. ET (7:09 p.m. PT) on Thursday, March 4, with coverage beginning at 9:15 p.m. ET (6:15 p.m. PT).
You can watch NASA’s livestream of the launch either by using the video embedded at the top of this page or by going to NASA’s YouTube page for the launch. If you want more information about the launch directly from NASA, then members of the public are also invited to register for virtual attendance, though registration isn’t necessary to watch the YouTube stream.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.