NASA SPHEREx telescope is launched to study universe's origins

By Will Dunham

(Reuters) - A NASA telescope was launched into space from California on Tuesday for a mission to explore the origins of the universe and to scour the Milky Way galaxy for hidden reservoirs of water, a key ingredient for life.

The U.S. space agency's megaphone-shaped SPHEREx - short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer - was carried aloft by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

During its planned two-year mission, the observatory will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way. It will create a three-dimensional map of the cosmos in 102 colors - individual wavelengths of light - and will study the history and evolution of galaxies.

The mission aims to deepen the understanding of a phenomenon known as cosmic inflation, referring to the universe's rapid and exponential expansion from a single point in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that occurred roughly 13.8 billion years ago.

"SPHEREx is really trying to get at the origins of the universe - what happened in those very few first instants after the Big Bang," SPHEREx instrument scientist Phil Korngut of Caltech said.

"The reigning theory that describes this is called inflation. As its name posits, it proposes that the universe underwent an enormous expansion, going from smaller than the size of an atom, expanding a trillion-trillion fold in just a tiny fraction of a second," Korngut said.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA headquarters, said SPHEREx is going to search for "reverberations from the Big Bang - the fractions of a second after the Big Bang that echoed into the areas SPHEREx is going to directly observe."

SPHEREx will take pictures in every direction around Earth, splitting the light from billions of cosmic sources such as stars and galaxies into their component wavelengths to determine their composition and distance.

Within our galaxy, SPHEREx will search for reservoirs of water frozen on the surface of interstellar dust grains in large clouds of gas and dust that give rise to stars and planets.

It will look for water and molecules including carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide frozen on the surface of dust grains in molecular clouds, which are dense regions of gas and dust in interstellar space. Scientists believe that reservoirs of ice bound to dust grains in these clouds are where most of the universe's water forms and dwells.

Being launched along with SPHEREx is a constellation of satellites for NASA's PUNCH - short for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere - mission to better understand the solar wind, the continuous flow of charged particles from the sun.

The solar wind and other energetic solar events can cause space weather effects that play havoc with human technology, including interfering with satellites and triggering power outages.

The PUNCH mission is seeking to answer how the sun's atmosphere transitions to the solar wind, how structures in the solar wind are formed and how these processes influence Earth and the rest of the solar system.

The mission involves four suitcase-sized satellites that will observe the sun and its environment.

"Together, they piece together the three-dimensional global view of the solar corona - the sun's atmosphere - as it turns into the solar wind, which is the material that fills our whole solar system," said PUNCH mission scientist Nicholeen Viall of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

(Reporting by Will Dunham in Washington, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)