From interstellar dust to life beyond Earth: Why scientists can't wait NASA's new SPHEREx space telescope

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A modest NASA space telescope with grand ambitions is scheduled to soon launch into an orbit around Earth.
The megaphone-shaped spacecraft, called SPHEREx — short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer — is scheduled to share a ride atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday (March 4) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
"I'm the most jazzed about the all-sky nature of the observatory — SPHEREx will be looking at the entire sky!" Keighley Rockcliffe, a postdoc at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who's studying exoplanet atmospheres at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com. The space telescope is designed to do so with unmatched clarity, gathering a big-picture view that will help scientists tackle questions about the origin of the universe itself, the galaxies within and life's essential ingredients wafting in our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
A key science goal for the SPHEREx mission is to pinpoint the locations of life's basic ingredients nestled within vast regions of gas and dust known as molecular clouds, where stars and planets form. To accomplish this, the telescope is equipped with a prism-like spectrophotometer to "see" in wavelengths invisible to the human eye, which will allow it to illuminate millions of stars and galaxies for scientists in more than a hundred infrared colors. "This is key to the mission's search for water and other life-associated molecules and compounds," Rockcliffe said.
While scientists have previously detected lots of complex organic molecules in the interstellar medium and protoplanetary disks, "we still do not know a lot about the actual abundances of useful building blocks," astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam of the Florida Institute of Technology told Space.com. That means scientists don't have strong constraints about how efficiently frozen water molecules are transferred from interstellar clouds to protoplanetary disks, where they would eventually be incorporated into newborn planets, he said. "This mission can improve the data, and help make better forecasts about the probability of the origin of life on those worlds."
By mapping the entire sky, the $488 million mission may also reveal the distribution and chemistry of interstellar dust, which is not very well understood despite being ubiquitous in nearly every astronomical observation ever taken, according to Rockcliffe.
"Many astronomers think about interstellar dust as a nuisance, it 'gets in the way' of us observing more objects or objects in more detail," she said. "SPHEREx will prove that there are interesting things hiding in between our stars that we should care about."
Another key science goal for SPHEREx is to help scientists narrow down the elusive physics that propelled the nearly instantaneous ballooning of space in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang — a phenomenon called cosmic inflation. "We don't understand the physics simply because it involved energy scales which way beyond anything we can probe on Earth," Olivier Dore, the project scientist for the SPHEREx mission, told Space.com.
SPHEREx will put together a 3D map of distributions of more than 450 million galaxies, which will reveal very subtle signatures — ripples amplified during inflation and imprinted into the large-scale structure of the universe — that can be traced directly to the very first moments of the universe, Dore said.
Related Stories:
— NASA launching its SPHEREx and PUNCH space missions on March 2 after delay: How to watch live
— 2 NASA missions will carpool on a SpaceX rocket this Friday to help map the cosmos
— NASA's launching a new sun mission this month: 'PUNCH is going to see a total solar eclipse'
Moreover, because the SPHEREx telescope will be mapping the entire sky four times over the next two years, it will also observe pockets of the universe scientists have never looked at before, Dore added.
"That's going to be visually striking and very powerful."

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