NASA’s SPHEREx Telescope to Map 450 Million Galaxies

NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory has opened its lenses, capturing images of the sky from space following its launch on 11 March 2025. The photo shows a cloud of molecules, showing it off in impressive orange-hued and blue-toned images.

NASA SPHEREx Kicks Off Its Mission

NASA’s SPHEREx mission aims to collect data on over 450 million galaxies and 100 million stars scattered across the Milky Way. This mission will last for two years, and the first images from the space observatory are now available for our viewing.

To help it take well-detailed images of various galaxies and stars, the observatory can take images in over 102 infrared wavelengths. The wavelengths for the images in consideration here are 3.29 micrometres, which displays images in an orange hue, and the second is a 0.98 micrometre wavelength that displays images in a blue tone.

This ability to see over 102 wavelengths makes the NASA SPHEREx space observatory stand out from other observatories exploring the sky from space.

NASA SPHEREx Aims To Expand Our Understanding Of Our Universe

Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astropysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, says that “SPHEREx will play a key role in answering the big questions about the universe we tackle at NASA every day.”

Jim Fanson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, also points out how these daily data will drive studies on our universe. He says that using the collected data, NASA will “study what happened on the smallest size scales in the universe’s earliest moments by looking at the modern universe on the largest scales.”

So far, the mission’s performance is on par with NASA’s expectations, hence, research should proceed smoothly. Over the next two years, we expect to learn more about our universe from the images SPHEREx takes from space.