Jakarta, Indonesia Sentinel — NASA‘s latest space telescope, SPHEREx, successfully launched into orbit on Tuesday (March 11), embarking on a mission to map 450 million galaxies across the universe. Equipped with cutting-edge technology, the SPHEREx telescope is expected to help scientists uncover what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
The launch came after multiple delays since late February, as engineers took additional time to assess the rocket and its components, while also dealing with poor weather conditions at the launch site.
According to CNN Indonesia, SPHEREx stands for “Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer.” The telescope is designed to scan the entire sky, study hundreds of millions of galaxies, and reconstruct how the universe was formed and evolved over time.
The cone-shaped spacecraft lifted off on Tuesday night at approximately 8:10 p.m. aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Alongside SPHEREx, four suitcase-sized satellites were also deployed for separate NASA missions focused on studying the Sun.
Space Observations Technology
With a budget of $488 million, SPHEREx will scan the entire sky four times over its two-year mission. Its instruments will observe the cosmos in 102 different colors or wavelengths, significantly surpassing the capabilities of previous missions, according to NASA.
Infrared light, which has longer wavelengths than visible light, is undetectable to the human eye. However, in space, infrared emissions from stars, galaxies, and other celestial objects contain crucial information about their composition, density, temperature, and chemical makeup.
Read Also:
Elon Musk Calls for Immediate Destruction of the International Space Station (ISS)
Using a technique known as spectroscopy, scientists will analyze the infrared light by breaking it down into different colors, much like a prism dispersing sunlight into a multicolored spectrum. The data collected by SPHEREx will provide researchers with insights into the chemical properties and characteristics of hundreds of millions of galaxies throughout the universe.
NASA stated that these observations could help scientists understand how galaxies are formed, trace the origins of water in the Milky Way, and gather information about what occurred after the Big Bang, which created the universe approximately 13.8 billion years ago.
(Raidi/Agung)
