NASA announced that its space observatory, SPHEREx, has officially begun a series of scientific operations, marking a major step toward revealing new insights into the origins of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and the basic components of life in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Over the next two years, SPHEREx will take about 3,600 images per day as it conducts a systematic survey of the entire sky.
Launched on March 11, SPHEREx has spent the past six weeks undergoing checks, calibrations and other activities to ensure the space telescope is functioning as it should, according to NASA.
With a series of ongoing scientific operations, SPHEREx will map the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in three dimensions. The goal is to answer some of the most fundamental questions in cosmology, such as how the universe began and how its large-scale structure evolved.
"This new observatory joins a growing series of space-based astrophysical survey missions leading up to the launch of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Along with other missions, SPHEREx will play a critical role in answering the big questions about the universe that we at NASA work on every day," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA headquarters in Washington.
