The concept of an artist shows Sperex in orbit around the earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
Update Wednesday 12 March 2025: the Spacex Falcon 9 rocket that transported Spherex it was successfully launched by the Vandenberg Space Force base at 11:10 pm EDT of 11 March. After the deployment, the Spherex Observatory has established a signal with the land controllers and its mission will soon begin.
An infrared spatial telescope is expected for the launch of this week to map the sky not one but four times and with clarity without rivals. With a launch date already on Friday 28 February, the spectrum of NASA for the history of the universe, the era of Reionization and Eces Explorer (Spherex) will face the most thorny mysteries of physics, from what happened immediately after the Big Bang until the first galaxies were formed and where the lifestyle blocks will come from.
Swept for success
Built by Ball Aerospace with a useful load provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of Caltech and NASA and the test structures of the Korean astronomy and the Space Science Institute (Kasi), the 1,100 pound sphere (500 kilograms) weighs as much as a piano and runs on a less power than a refrigerator in the kitchen. But it promises to put a scientific punch well above its poor size.
In the shape of a large Bullhorn, it is 8.5 feet tall (2.6 meters) and extends to 10.5 feet (3.2 m) to the wider – three nested photographic shields that surround and protect its delicate optical from the heat and light of the earth and the sun, as well as from the heat of the creation of spatiality, generated by its computers and electronics.
“The shields are actually quite light and made with layers of material such as a sandwich,” said Sara Susca, deputy responsible for the useful load of Spherex and Payload systems engineer, in a press release. “The exterior has aluminum sheets and inside is an aluminum bee nursery structure that looks like cardboard – light but robust.”
The spaces between the shields and the specialized conical mirrors (called radiators in V -Groove) will expel the heat in space, keeping the spherex temperature below -350 degrees Fahrenheit (–210 degrees Celsius). This helps prevent its infrared glow of crushing the weak light emitted by distant celestial objects.
“We don’t only deal with how Cold Spherex is, but also that its temperature remains the same,” said Konstantin Pennen, director of the useful load of the mission, in the jpl coverage of the mission. “If the temperature varies, it could change the sensitivity of the detector, which could translate into a false signal.”
The Triple-Mirror telescope of Guard Shields Guard, a 164 pound spectrophotometer (74.5 kg) that will scan the sky on 102 bands of colors with a better resolution compared to previous All-Sky maps. With an 8 -inch opening (20 centimeters), a visual field of 3.5 ° by 11.3 ° and two focal plan assemblies that housed six anchors of photoculars, its lack of moving parts reduces the risk of failures to a minimum, but it meant that its attention was to be configured with precision on earth to resist the penalties of the launch.
A long road
That launch has inexorably slipped out of reach for years. Spherex was proposed for the NASA Small Explorer (Smex) program in 2014, but was not selected. It was reinvised in 2016 as an average class explorer mission (Midex), limited to $ 250 million (excluding the costs of the launch vehicle) and was chosen by NASA in 2019 for the launch in 2023.
But the project – led by Caltech’s main investigator Jamie Bock – fought multiple unexpected events. The world march of Covid-19 hit the supply chains, the sellers interested and imposed limitations on the laboratory space, forcing the project staff to build engineering models of the space vehicle in their home seminars during the pandemic. With the delays mounted, the launch of Spherex slipped to June 2024, then at the beginning of 2025.
“The team is very cohesive and is almost like a family,” said Project Systems engineer Jennifer Rocca in a live supply and answer, speaking of Spherex’s resilient workforce, who maximized to about 150 employees to his peak. “We were together in the trenches. Our development team was together through Covid. We survived this. Recently we had a lot of members of our team affected by the fires of Los Angeles. And we survived that together to continue our launch campaign.”
Sharing of space
In 2021, Spacex’s Falcon 9 rocket was selected to launch Spherex at a cost of $ 98.8 million. And the low mass of the space vehicle meant that another NASA scientific mission was added to the launch in 2022 as Payload Rideshare. “It has just been discovered that there was another satellite that was developed that needed a passage in a very similar position in space,” said Cesar Marin, Spherex integration engineer with the NASA launching service program, in a panel of the press conference on January 31st.
Spherex’s carpooling companion is the polarimeter to unify the crown and the eliosphere (punch)-four satellite satellites, each of the weight of 88 pounds (40 kg) which will explore the crown and the sunny wind of the sun. Punch can afford insights on space time, including ejection of coronal mass that can disable space vehicles and stop terrestrial electric grids.
Spherex will enter an almost polar orbit of 430 miles (700 kilometers) above the earth, with a punch that aims at a point of abandonment of 350 miles (560 km). The take-off will occur from the launch complex of space 4 East (SLC-4E) at the base of the Vandenberg spatial force in California during a 30-second launch window at 19:09 PST on February 27. Weather permitting, the post-tram to launch should be visible along the California coast.
In 2023, Spherex underwent environmental tests in Kasi’s vacuum chamber, a SUV structure shipped from South Korea to Caltech for acoustic, thermal and vibration tests. The space vehicle was cooled at cryogenic temperatures and the engineers verified that its optics were carefully aligned with 0,0003 inches (7.5 micrometers)-a tenth of the width of a human hair.
“It is absolutely essential to focus on this thing before flying,” said Phil Korngut, a scientist of the Spherex tool, in the mission JPL coverage. “And the only way to achieve that it is through specific cryogenic optical tests in the environment provided by the Kasi Chamber.”
Mission objectives
Once in space, Spherex will occupy a synchronous orbit in the sun-district. “This means that our plane orbit … is always in front of the sun,” said Spherex Beth Fabinsky’s deputy Project Manager in the press conference. “The telescope can indicate and far from the earth and at the same time normal to the sun line, and can prevent us from getting sun and earth on our cold and dark detectors.”
The 25 -month scientific phase of the mission will scan over 99 percent of the sky every six months, completing four maps in the sky. Unlike most space telescopes, Spherex will quickly observe large bands of the sky and quickly examine more celestial objects.
This distinguishes it from punctual missions such as Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the next NASA Roman Grace Space Telescope. Spherex’s global perspective will help to answer large questions about the evolution of the universe, spotting the characteristics of the scientific interest in the detailed inspection of Hubble, Jwst and Roman.
Spherex has three scientific goals. Inflation will explore: a short but powerful cosmic event when the space-time has expanded a trillion of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Although that event occurred almost 14 billion years ago, the Spelx maps of the relative positions of 450 million galaxies could reveal clues to physics behind inflation and how it influenced the large -scale distribution of matter in the universe.
Secondly, it will measure the collective glow with galaxies – including too small, too widespread or too distant to see other telescopes – and create a more complete picture of radiant objects in the universe. Spherex will make fun of the processes with which the first galaxies have taken shape and how their first stars have evolved.
And thirdly, it will pair the Milky Way with frozen granules of water, carbon dioxide and other essential ingredients for life in Star Nursery and Protoplanetary Disks to understand their relative abundance and places through our galaxy. This promises further insights on the probability that the frozen compounds are incorporated into recently formated planets.
A cosmic census
The infrared spatial telescopes generally transported large cryogenic liquid dewings to cool their perspective, but these tanks were quickly exhausted, limiting the operating lives of the missions. Spherex will be passively cooled through its shields and photon radiators, potentially allowing an extension of the mission beyond the basic line of 25 months.
Like the Bullhorn whose form imitates closely, Spherex’s discoveries promise to echo through the astronomical community, unmasking the most mysterious events of the universe and identifying the areas of interest for the targeted study. Fabinsky considers Spherex nothing but a census of the cosmos.
“It is the difference between knowing some individual people and making a census and getting to know the population as a whole,” said the mission jpl in the coverage. “Both types of studies are important and complete each other. But there are some questions that you can only answer through that census.”
