NASA's new SPHEREx telescope would reveal what happened right after big-bang; Read details

Just four months after launching the most powerful space telescope ever, NASA has unveiled yet another state-of-the-art observatory that would map the entire sky to create a cosmic map. Named Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), the telescope is targeted for launch no earlier than April 2025, NASA said. Interestingly, the telescope would be able to tell what happened within the first second after the big bang as well as how galaxies form and evolve. In addition to this, it would also help determine the prevalence of molecules critical to the formation of life, like water, which might exist as ice. 

Allen Farrington, SPHEREx project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said as per NASA's statement, "The design for the spacecraft, as it stands, is confirmed. We have shown that it’s doable down to the smallest details. So now we can really start building and putting things together". 

How would the telescope work?

Since scientists are looking to answer big questions regarding the universe, this telescope is being designed to look at the sky in a different way. Although the SPHEREx would bear similarities to the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA says that both the observatories would take completely different approaches. Unlike the telescopes such as Webb and the Hubble space telescope, which focus on individual stars, galaxies, or other cosmic objects, to study them in detail, the SPHEREx would observe large portions of the sky. According to the agency, SPHEREx will scan over 99% of the sky every six months in comparison to Hubble, which has observed only about 0.1% of the sky in over three decades. 

It is worth mentioning, however, that the SPHEREx would not provide the same level of detail of objects as Webb, but it would answer important questions about the typical properties of these objects. As for the size, the new telescope would have an 8-inch primary mirror and a sunshield measuring just 10.5 feet across. For comparison, the Webb telescope has a 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) primary mirror and a tennis-court-sized sunshield. 

However, the challenge before the engineers before launching the telescope is to ensure if the instrument onboard could survive the environment in space and if all its components could be packed together and operate as a system.

Image: NASA