{"id":198839,"date":"2025-12-18T19:23:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T19:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/198839\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T19:23:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T19:23:08","slug":"nasas-spherex-observatory-completes-first-cosmic-map-like-no-other-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/198839\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s SPHEREx Observatory Completes First Cosmic Map Like No Other"},"content":{"rendered":"

And while a handful of previous missions has also mapped the entire sky, such as NASA\u2019s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer<\/a>, none have done so in nearly as many colors as SPHEREx. By contrast, NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope<\/a> can do spectroscopy with significantly more wavelengths of light than SPHEREx, but with a field of view thousands of times smaller. The combination of colors and such a wide field of view is why SPHEREx is so powerful.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe superpower of SPHEREx is that it captures the whole sky in 102 colors about every six months. That\u2019s an amazing amount of information to gather in a short amount of time,\u201d said Beth Fabinsky, the SPHEREx project manager at JPL. \u201cI think this makes us the mantis shrimp of telescopes, because we have an amazing multicolor visual detection system and we can also see a very wide swath of our surroundings.\u201d<\/p>\n

To accomplish this feat, SPHEREx uses six detectors, each paired with a specially designed filter that contains a gradient of 17 colors. That means every image taken with those six detectors contains 102 colors (six times 17). It also means that every all-sky map that SPHEREx produces is really 102 maps, each in a different color.<\/p>\n

The observatory will use those colors to measure the distance to hundreds of millions of galaxies. Though the positions of most of those galaxies have already been mapped in two dimensions by other observatories, SPHEREx\u2019s map will be in 3D, enabling scientists to measure subtle variations in the way galaxies are clustered and distributed across the universe.<\/p>\n

Those measurements will offer insights into an event that took place in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang. In this moment, called inflation, the universe expanded by a trillion-trillionfold. Nothing like it has occurred in the universe since, and scientists want to understand it better. The SPHEREx mission\u2019s approach is one way to help in that effort.<\/p>\n

More about SPHEREx<\/p>\n

The SPHEREx mission is managed by JPL for NASA\u2019s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The telescope and the spacecraft bus were built by BAE Systems. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data is being conducted by a team of scientists at 10 institutions across the U.S., and in South Korea and Taiwan. Data is processed and archived at IPAC<\/a> at Caltech in Pasadena, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission\u2019s principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset is publicly available.<\/p>\n

For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/mission\/spherex\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And while a handful of previous missions has also mapped the entire sky, such as NASA\u2019s Wide-field Infrared…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":{"0":"post-198839","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}