NASA SPHEREx Is About to Launch — And It Might Change Astronomy Forever

Regardless of its small size, NASA is betting big on the SPHEREx telescope and its impressive camera system to help us better understand the cosmos. On 27 February 2025, this telescope will head to space on a two-year mission. It aims to help expand humanity’s knowledge about our galaxy.

What Makes The NASA SPHEREx Telescope Special?

To better understand the NASA SPHEREx telescope, we need to first understand its naming. The name SPHEREx is short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. It highlights one of this telescope’s aims.

This space gadget will help to expand on the achievement of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on 25 December 2021. Notably, the soon-to-launch SPHEREx telescope will need to pack better imaging technology to achieve this aim.

According to official reports, this telescope will divide the light from the sky into 96 bands. This will help it to cover more. Its imaging system will be responsible for the imaging of over 1 billion galaxies, 100 million stars, and 10,000 asteroids from multiple galaxies.

Another aim of this telescope is to measure the universe’s rapid expansion after the Big Bang, a phenomenon known as cosmic inflation. To do this, the telescope will rely on the spectroscopic images it takes to measure the 3D positions of various galaxies.

NASA explains, all of this will be to help “improve our understanding of how the universe evolved and search for key ingredients for life in our galaxy.” In a few days, we will observe this telescope go into action after its space entry aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket.

How To Watch The NASA SPHEREx Telescope Launch

NASA has laid out a roadmap leading to the launch of the SPHEREx telescope on 27 February 2025. The line of activities leading up to this launch will start on 25 February 2025 and end on 28 February 2025.

For this launch event, NASA is sending two missions, the second being PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere). The first event to take place on 25 February 2025 will be the overview news conference on the two launches.

Next is the prelaunch news conference which will take place on 27 February 2025 the day of the launch. On 28 February 2025 will be the launch preview which will be live-streamed.
All three events, including the launch event itself, will be live-streamed on NASA+’s official website. If you wish to watch all events or just the launch event, you can access the NASA+ official website from 25-28 February 2025.