[NASA image]
Washington: American space agency NASA is planning to launch a new telescope which is likely to be better than its existing James Webb Space (JWS) telescope.
Named SPHEREx, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionisation and Ices Explorer, is set to enter NASA’s space telescope epic in ongoing month February if everything goes as per the plan.
Launched on December 25, 2021, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a joint project of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency. It is the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever built.
Whereas the $10 billion JWST is great at observing things like specific nebulas and relatively narrow but tremendously dimensional deep fields, SPHEREx is intended to image the entire sky as seen from Earth, according to Space.com.
Shaped like a megaphone, the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) is a planned two-year mission that will survey the sky in optical as well as near-infrared light which, though not visible to the human eye, serves as a powerful tool for answering cosmic questions, according to NASA.
Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 450 million galaxies, as well as, more than 100 million stars in our own Milky Way, the American space agency said.
The new telescope was unboxed on January 25 when NASA said it was ready for prelaunch operations.
[NASA image]
The SPHEREx telescope will be launched in space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket after February 27, 2025, NASA said.
SPHEREx will share its ride with the agency's PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission.
The mission is a constellation of 4 little satellites meant to study the Sun, as part of Nasa’s Launch Services Programme, which connects space missions with appropriate commercial launch vehicles.
The space telescope will detect over 100 colors from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies, making ‘most colorful’ cosmic map ever.
“We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colors,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based jointly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, both in Southern California.
“Whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries", Jamie said.
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