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By Amazing Space
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s SPHEREx mission is observing the entire sky in 102 infrared colors, or wavelengths of light not visible to the human eye. This image shows a section of sky in one wavelength (3.29 microns), revealing a cloud of dust made of a molecule similar to soot or smoke.NASA/JPL-Caltech This image from NASA’s SPHEREx shows the same region of space in a different infrared wavelength (0.98 microns), but the dust cloud is no longer visible. The molecules that compose the dust — polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — do not radiate light in this color.NASA/JPL-Caltech After weeks of preparation, the space observatory has begun its science mission, taking about 3,600 unique images per day to create a map of the cosmos like no other.
Launched on March 11, NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory has spent the last six weeks undergoing checkouts, calibrations, and other activities to ensure it is working as it should. Now it’s mapping the entire sky — not just a large part of it — to chart the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to answer some big questions about the universe. On May 1, the spacecraft began regular science operations, which consist of taking about 3,600 images per day for the next two years to provide new insights about the origins of the universe, galaxies, and the ingredients for life in the Milky Way.
This video shows SPHEREx’s field of view as it scans across one section of sky inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, with rainbow colors representing the infrared wavelengths the telescope’s detectors see. The view from one detector array moves from purple to green, followed by the second array’s view, which changes from yellow to red. The images are looped four times. NASA/JPL-Caltech “Thanks to the hard work of teams across NASA, industry, and academia that built this mission, SPHEREx is operating just as we’d expected and will produce maps of the full sky unlike any we’ve had before,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This new observatory is adding to the suite of space-based astrophysics survey missions leading up to the launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Together with these other missions, SPHEREx will play a key role in answering the big questions about the universe we tackle at NASA every day.”
From its perch in Earth orbit, SPHEREx peers into the darkness, pointing away from the planet and the Sun. The observatory will complete more than 11,000 orbits over its 25 months of planned survey operations, circling Earth about 14½ times a day. It orbits Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and each day it takes images along one circular strip of the sky. As the days pass and the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx’s field of view shifts as well so that after six months, the observatory will have looked out into space in every direction.
When SPHEREx takes a picture of the sky, the light is sent to six detectors that each produces a unique image capturing different wavelengths of light. These groups of six images are called an exposure, and SPHEREx takes about 600 exposures per day. When it’s done with one exposure, the whole observatory shifts position — the mirrors and detectors don’t move as they do on some other telescopes. Rather than using thrusters, SPHEREx relies on a system of reaction wheels, which spin inside the spacecraft to control its orientation.
Hundreds of thousands of SPHEREx’s images will be digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps in two years. By mapping the entire sky, the mission will provide new insights about what happened in the first fraction of a second after the big bang. In that brief instant, an event called cosmic inflation caused the universe to expand a trillion-trillionfold.
“We’re going to study what happened on the smallest size scales in the universe’s earliest moments by looking at the modern universe on the largest scales,” said Jim Fanson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “I think there’s a poetic arc to that.”
Cosmic inflation subtly influenced the distribution of matter in the universe, and clues about how such an event could happen are written into the positions of galaxies across the universe. When cosmic inflation began, the universe was smaller than the size of an atom, but the properties of that early universe were stretched out and influence what we see today. No other known event or process involves the amount of energy that would have been required to drive cosmic inflation, so studying it presents a unique opportunity to understand more deeply how our universe works.
“Some of us have been working toward this goal for 12 years,” said Jamie Bock, the mission’s principal investigator at Caltech and JPL. “The performance of the instrument is as good as we hoped. That means we’re going to be able to do all the amazing science we planned on and perhaps even get some unexpected discoveries.”
Color Field
The SPHEREx observatory won’t be the first to map the entire sky, but it will be the first to do so in so many colors. It observes 102 wavelengths, or colors, of infrared light, which are undetectable to the human eye. Through a technique called spectroscopy, the telescope separates the light into wavelengths — much like a prism creates a rainbow from sunlight — revealing all kinds of information about cosmic sources.
For example, spectroscopy can be harnessed to determine the distance to a faraway galaxy, information that can be used to turn a 2D map of those galaxies into a 3D one. The technique will also enable the mission to measure the collective glow from all the galaxies that ever existed and see how that glow has changed over cosmic time.
And spectroscopy can reveal the composition of objects. Using this capability, the mission is searching for water and other key ingredients for life in these systems in our galaxy. It’s thought that the water in Earth’s oceans originated as frozen water molecules attached to dust in the interstellar cloud where the Sun formed.
The SPHEREx mission will make over 9 million observations of interstellar clouds in the Milky Way, mapping these materials across the galaxy and helping scientists understand how different conditions can affect the chemistry that produced many of the compounds found on Earth today.
More About SPHEREx
The SPHEREx mission is managed by JPL for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Caltech in Pasadena managed and integrated the instrument. The mission’s principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available at the NASA-IPAC Infrared Science Archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more about SPHEREx, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
2025-063
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Last Updated May 01, 2025 Related Terms
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Exoplanets Galaxies Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Search for Life The Universe Explore More
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By NASA
Did you know some of the brightest sources of light in the sky come from the regions around black holes in the centers of galaxies? It sounds a little contradictory, but it’s true! They may not look bright to our eyes, but satellites have spotted oodles of them across the universe.
One of those satellites is NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi has found thousands of these kinds of galaxies since it launched in 2008, and there are many more out there!
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Watch a cosmic gamma-ray fireworks show in this animation using just a year of data from the Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Each object’s magenta circle grows as it brightens and shrinks as it dims. The yellow circle represents the Sun following its apparent annual path across the sky. The animation shows a subset of the LAT gamma-ray records available for more than 1,500 objects in a continually updated repository. Over 90% of these sources are a type of galaxy called a blazar, powered by the activity of a supermassive black hole. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center/Daniel Kocevski Black holes are regions of space that have so much gravity that nothing — not light, not particles, nada — can escape. Most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, and these black holes are hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our Sun. In active galactic nuclei (also called “AGN” for short, or just “active galaxies”) the central region is stuffed with gas and dust that’s constantly falling toward the black hole. As the gas and dust fall, they start to spin and form a disk. Because of the friction and other forces at work, the spinning disk starts to heat up.
This composite view of the active galaxy Markarian 573 combines X-ray data (blue) from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio observations (purple) from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico with a visible light image (gold) from the Hubble Space Telescope. Markarian 573 is an active galaxy that has two cones of emission streaming away from the supermassive black hole at its center. X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/A.Paggi et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA The disk’s heat gets emitted as light, but not just wavelengths of it that we can see with our eyes. We detect light from AGN across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the more familiar radio and optical waves through to the more exotic X-rays and gamma rays, which we need special telescopes to spot.
In the heart of an active galaxy, matter falling toward a supermassive black hole creates jets of particles traveling near the speed of light as shown in this artist’s concept. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab About one in 10 AGN beam out jets of energetic particles, which are traveling almost as fast as light. Scientists are studying these jets to try to understand how black holes — which pull everything in with their huge amounts of gravity — somehow provide the energy needed to propel the particles in these jets.
This artist’s concept shows two views of the active galaxy TXS 0128+554, located around 500 million light-years away. Left: The galaxy’s central jets appear as they would if we viewed them both at the same angle. The black hole, embedded in a disk of dust and gas, launches a pair of particle jets traveling at nearly the speed of light. Scientists think gamma rays (magenta) detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope originate from the base of these jets. As the jets collide with material surrounding the galaxy, they form identical lobes seen at radio wavelengths (orange). The jets experienced two distinct bouts of activity, which created the gap between the lobes and the black hole. Right: The galaxy appears in its actual orientation, with its jets tipped out of our line of sight by about 50 degrees. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Many of the ways we tell one type of AGN from another depend on how they’re oriented from our point of view. With radio galaxies, for example, we see the jets from the side as they’re beaming vast amounts of energy into space. Then there’s blazars, which are a type of AGN that have a jet that is pointed almost directly at Earth, which makes the AGN particularly bright.
Blazar 3C 279’s historic gamma-ray flare in 2015 can be seen in this image from the Large Area Telescope on NASA’s Fermi satellite. During the flare, the blazar outshone the Vela pulsar, usually the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky. NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration Fermi has been searching the sky for gamma ray sources since 2008. More than half of the sources it has found have been blazars. Gamma rays are useful because they can tell us a lot about how particles accelerate and how they interact with their environment.
So why do we care about AGN? We know that some AGN formed early in the history of the universe. With their enormous power, they almost certainly affected how the universe changed over time. By discovering how AGN work, we can understand better how the universe came to be the way it is now.
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Last Updated Apr 30, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
3 min read
Help Classify Galaxies Seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope!
The Galaxy Zoo classification interface shows you an image from NASA’s Webb telescope and asks you questions about it. Image credit: Galaxy Zoo, Zooniverse. Inset galaxy: NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay/A. Pagan NASA needs your help identifying the shapes of thousands of galaxies in images taken by our James Webb Space Telescope with the Galaxy Zoo project. These classifications will help scientists answer questions about how the shapes of galaxies have changed over time, what caused these changes, and why. Thanks to the light collecting power of Webb, there are now over 500,000 images of galaxies on website of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project—more images than scientists can classify by themselves.
“This is a great opportunity to see images from the newest space telescope,” said volunteer Christine Macmillan from Aberdeen, Scotland. “Galaxies at the edge of our universe are being seen for the first time, just as they are starting to form. Just sign up and answer simple questions about the shape of the galaxy that you are seeing. Anyone can do it, ages 10 and up!”
As we look at more distant objects in the universe, we see them as they were billions of years ago because light takes time to travel to us. With Webb, we can spot galaxies at greater distances than ever before. We’re seeing what some of the earliest galaxies ever detected look like, for the first time. The shapes of these galaxies tell us about how they were born, how and when they formed stars, and how they interacted with their neighbors. By looking at how more distant galaxies have different shapes than close galaxies, we can work out which processes were more common at different times in the universe’s history.
At Galaxy Zoo, you’ll first examine an image from the Webb telescope. Then you will be asked several questions, such as ‘Is the galaxy round?’, or ‘Are there signs of spiral arms?’. If you’re quick, you may even be the first person to see the galaxies you’re asked to classify.
“I’m amazed and honored to be one of the first people to actually see these images! What a privilege!” said volunteer Elisabeth Baeten from Leuven, Belgium.
Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project with a long history of scientific impact. Galaxy Zoo volunteers have been exploring deep space since July 2007, starting with a million galaxies from a telescope in New Mexico called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and then, moving on to images from space telescopes like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ESA (European Space Agency)’s Euclid telescope. The project has revealed spectacular mergers, taught us about how the black holes at the center of galaxies affect their hosts, and provided insight into how features like spiral arms form and grow.
Now, in addition to adding new data from Webb, the science team has incorporated an AI algorithm called ZooBot, which will sift through the images first and label the ‘easier ones’ where there are many examples that already exist in previous images from the Hubble Space Telescope. When ZooBot is not confident on the classification of a galaxy, perhaps due to complex or faint structures, it will show it to users on Galaxy Zoo to get their human classifications, which will then help ZooBot learn more. Working together, humans and AI can accurately classify limitless numbers of galaxies. The Galaxy Zoo science team acknowledges support from the International Space Sciences Institute (ISSI), who provided funding for the team to get together and work on Galaxy Zoo. Join the project now.
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Last Updated Apr 29, 2025 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
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This groundbreaking mission will offer unprecedented insights into the state and evolution of the world’s forests. By mapping the woody material in Earth’s forests, this revolutionary satellite will play a crucial role in deepening our understanding of how forests influence the global carbon cycle.
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