SpaceX already has a number of lucrative contracts with NASA thanks to the reusable Falcon 9 rocket, not least, the recently realized Commercial Crew program. However, NASA does not just use SpaceX for crew flights. The agency has just awarded another cargo contract, the one to deploy the upcoming SPHEREx space telescope. This instrument will scan the entire sky over two years, but it will only start in early 2024.
SPHEREx is part of NASA’s Medium-Class Explorers (MIDEX) program, along with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and nearly a dozen other missions dating back to the early 90’s. SPHEREx is a particularly tortured acronym that stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. This means that SHPEREx will map the sky in near-infrared, which is beyond the limit of human vision.
The total cost of SpaceX’s SPHEREx launch services is $ 98.8 million, a significant portion of the expected $ 395 to $ 427 million allocated by NASA for the project. TESS is designed to observe objects up to a few hundred light-years away, but SPHEREx should be able to scan more than 300 million galaxies and 100 million stars in the Milky Way using its spectrophotometer.
The Falcon 9 is NASA’s choice to launch SPHEREx into space in 2024.
SPHEREx can help scientists better understand how galaxies form and evolve. Every six months, SPHEREx uses its 20 cm telescope to create an entire sky map in 96 different color bands. NASA believes that SHPEREx can collect important data on the presence of water molecules and organic matter in distant star-forming regions. This will help NASA identify targets for future study with more powerful instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA is particularly interested in collecting data that will illuminate the ‘era of ionization’, a period in the early universe when the first stars and galaxies formed and reionized the neutral hydrogen that dominated space at the time. SPHEREx will also look further back at the very beginning in search of evidence for a theoretical property of the Big Bang called inflation.
Although, even the chronically retarded Webb, SPEREx has to beat in space. NASA has not yet begun building SPHEREx, which will be a joint effort of NASA JPL and Caltech. The launch is currently scheduled for June 2024 at the Vandenberg Air Force Base.
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