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Title: NASA's SPHEREx Space Telescope Begins Capturing Entire Sky
Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/0...
NASA's SPHEREx space observatory has officially begun its two-year mission to
map the entire sky in 102 infrared wavelengths, capturing about 3,600 images
daily to create 3D maps of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Its goal is to
unlock new insights into cosmic inflation, the origins of galaxies, and the
building blocks of life in the Milky Way by using spectroscopy to analyze
light and matter across the universe. From a press release: From its perch in
Earth orbit, SPHEREx peers into the darkness, pointing away from the planet
and the Sun. The observatory will complete more than 11,000 orbits over its
25 months of planned survey operations, circling Earth about 14.5 times a
day. It orbits Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and each
day it takes images along one circular strip of the sky. As the days pass and
the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx's field of view shifts as well so
that after six months, the observatory will have looked out into space in
every direction. When SPHEREx takes a picture of the sky, the light is sent
to six detectors that each produces a unique image capturing different
wavelengths of light. These groups of six images are called an exposure, and
SPHEREx takes about 600 exposures per day. When it's done with one exposure,
the whole observatory shifts position -- the mirrors and detectors don't move
as they do on some other telescopes. Rather than using thrusters, SPHEREx
relies on a system of reaction wheels, which spin inside the spacecraft to
control its orientation. Hundreds of thousands of SPHEREx's images will be
digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps in two years. By mapping
the entire sky, the mission will provide new insights about what happened in
the first fraction of a second after the big bang. In that brief instant, an
event called cosmic inflation caused the universe to expand a trillion-
trillionfold.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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