Program News and Announcements

13 March 2025

It’s SPHEREx Day at Physics of the Cosmos!

We’re covering everything SPHEREx today! Everything from how to rewatch the launch to quick facts about SPHEREx and even things you can do at home.

SPHEREx & PUNCH Successfully Launched on March 11th 2025!

Congratulations to both teams on a successful launch!

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission will provide an all-sky spectral survey. Over a two-year planned mission, the SPHEREx Observatory will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe.

SPHEREx and PUNCH launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on March 11th, 2025.

The SPHEREx mission (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) will improve our understanding of what happened in the first second after the big bang and search for key ingredients for life in our galaxy. The PUNCH mission (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) will observe the Sun’s corona as it transitions into the solar wind.

The SPHEREx and PUNCH live launch broadcast can be watched on NASA YouTube.

Visit the NASA website for more information about SPHEREx and PUNCH.

Quick Facts About SPHEREx

NASA’s SPHEREx observatory will create a 3D map of the entire sky to help scientists answer big-picture questions about the origins of our universe, galaxies, and key ingredients for life in our galaxy, such as water.

SPHEREx images the entire sky in over 100 bands across a key part of the infrared spectrum. Linear-Variable filter technology lets the telescope efficiently collect large quantities of both spectral and imaging data simultaneously. Since each pixel in the SPHEREx detector arrays measures a different infrared color, combining data taken across several exposures yields full imaging and spectral data for any galaxy or other target of interest on the sky.

Learn more about the survey capabilities of SPHEREx here

While this all-sky map can be used for a wide variety of science investigations, the SPHEREx mission will focus on three key science goals:

Create a 3D map of hundreds of millions of galaxies in order to study inflation, which is the rapid expansion of the universe by a trillion-trillion-fold in less than a second after the big bang.
Measure the total collective glow of galaxies near and far, including the light from sources that may be hidden or haven’t yet been individually observed, such as faint or distant galaxies or populations of stars that have been pushed to peripheries of galaxies.
Search the Milky Way galaxy for hidden reservoirs of water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients for life, and measure their abundance and availability for newly forming planets.

Here are 8 things to know about SPHEREx as it looks to uncover mysteries about our cosmos:

The SPHEREx mission will help answer some of the biggest questions in astrophysics.
It adds unique strengths to NASA’s fleet of space telescopes.
This observatory will make the most colorful all-sky map ever.
The mission will shed light on a cosmic phenomenon called inflation that took place less than a second after the big bang.
It will measure the collective glow from galaxies near and far, including hidden galaxies that have not been individually observed.
The mission will search the Milky Way galaxy for essential building blocks of life.
The observatory stays cold thanks to its unique cone-shaped design.
The all-sky map generated by SPHEREx will be freely available to scientists around the world.

SPHEREx At Home!

NASA Eyes on the Solar System

Browser-based 3D simulation showing SPHEREx in the orbit from which it will make its observations.
SPHEREx Mission Poster

Follow the link here to download the brand new SPHEREx poster.