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New York Times
12-03-2025
- Science
- New York Times
NASA Launches New Space Telescope and Suite of Solar Satellites
Two NASA missions finally launched from the California coast and soared toward the stars late Tuesday night, overcoming a week of delays to get to orbit. Both aim to unravel mysteries about the universe — one by peering far from Earth, the other by looking closer to home. The rocket's chief passenger is SPHEREx, a space telescope that will take images of the entire sky in more than a hundred colors that are invisible to the human eye. Accompanying the telescope is a suite of satellites known collectively as PUNCH, which will study the sun's outer atmosphere and solar wind. The launch has been postponed several times since late February for mission specialists to perform additional checks on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and NASA spacecraft. Gloomy weather also contributed to a scrubbed launch on Monday night. But that was forgotten on Tuesday as SPHEREx and PUNCH lifted off from the Vandenburg Space Force Base against the black expanse of clear California sky at 11:11 p.m. Eastern time. Roughly two minutes later, the rocket's reusable booster separated from the upper stage and flipped back toward Earth for a controlled landing near the launch site. SPHEREx and PUNCH are heading to an orbit approximately 400 miles above Earth's terminator, the line separating day and night on our planet, circling over the north and south poles. This type of orbit is known as sun-synchronous because it keeps the spacecraft oriented in the same position relative to our sun. That's advantageous for both spacecraft. PUNCH can have a clear view of the sun around all times, while SPHEREx can stay pointed away from it, avoiding light from our home star that could mask fainter signals from faraway stars and galaxies. Charting the cosmos SPHEREx is short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. The mouthful of a name is fitting for the vastness of its goal: to survey the entire sky in 102 colors, or wavelengths, of infrared light. 'It's really the first of its kind,' said Olivier Doré, a cosmologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the mission's project scientist. By contrast, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which retired in 2011, mapped the sky in just four hues of infrared. Scientists will use the data from SPHEREx to study how the total light emitted by galaxies has changed through cosmic time and to chart where frozen water and other ingredients essential for life exist across the Milky Way. 'It's thought that the oceans on Earth originated from these interstellar ice reservoirs,' said James Bock, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology and principal investigator for the mission. A three-dimensional map charting the uneven clumping of galaxies across the universe today — some parts thick with galactic gas and dust, others more sparse — will also help physicists learn more about inflation, the rapid ballooning of the cosmos that occurred a split second after the Big Bang. According to Dr. Bock, tiny irregularities emerged as matter spread across the early universe. But inflation 'blew them up to cosmic scales,' he said, and the imprint of those irregularities is preserved in the overarching structure of today's cosmos. Physicists have long used measurements of the cosmic microwave background — the light left over from the Big Bang — to study inflation. But a galactic survey will allow them to gain an understanding of the physical processes that drove that extreme expansion. 'This is an idea that has been around, but we're really the first experiment designed to look for this,' Dr. Bock said. SPHEREx, which looks like a giant megaphone, will record around 600 images each day for more than two years, capturing light from millions of stars in our cosmic backyard and even more galaxies beyond it. Using a technique called spectroscopy, the telescope will separate the light into different wavelengths, like a glass prism splitting white light into a rainbow of colors. The color spectrum of an object in space reveals information about its chemical makeup and distance from Earth. At the end of its run, SPHEREx will have sampled the whole sky four times. 'We'll have spectra of every kind of celestial object — planets, stars, comets, asteroids, galaxies,' Dr. Doré said. 'And every time we look at the sky in a different way we discover new phenomena.' Tracking the solar wind According to Craig DeForest, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute, hot plasma continuously streaming from our sun washes over everything in the solar system, including us. It is the solar wind. 'We are not separate from our star,' he said. 'We are bathed in it.' Dr. DeForest is the principal investigator for PUNCH, which stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere. Data taken with PUNCH will elucidate the boundary where the sun ends and the solar wind begins. The two-year mission will also help forecasters better predict the potential effects of space weather, from power outages to glittering northern lights. Many solar missions focus on observing the sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona. 'It's like studying human biology with only an electron microscope,' Dr. DeForest said — great for looking at cells, bad for learning about anatomy. PUNCH is designed to measure both the corona and the broader cocoon of solar wind swaddling our solar system. The mission consists of four 140-pound satellites, each around the size of a suitcase. One satellite carries a coronagraph, which will take pictures of the sun's corona. The other three are equipped with cameras to capture wider views of the solar wind as it leaves the corona and permeates the solar system. Each satellite has three polarizing filters, through which only waves of light aligned in a particular direction can pass. That's similar to the way polarized sunglasses block glare. By measuring polarized light, scientists will be able to reconstruct the position, speed and direction of the corona and the solar wind in three dimensions. For the first time, they will also be able to track the evolution of coronal mass ejections, violent blasts of solar material, as they make their way to Earth and induce space weather. Joseph Westlake, the director of heliophysics at NASA, likened the data that PUNCH will collect to measuring a baseball after it has been thrown by a pitcher. Everything up until the ball leaves their hands, Dr. Westlake explained, is captured by missions like NASA's Parker Solar Probe and the Solar Dynamics Observatory. 'But actually seeing the ball as it goes from the hand to the home plate is PUNCH,' Dr. Westlake said. 'It takes what we see at the sun and connects it to what we experience on Earth.'
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
New JPL space mission seeks to unravel the mystery of cosmic 'inflation'
Before there was light, there was cosmic inflation. Before life, planet Earth, the first galaxies — and even before the violent explosion of hot dense primordial stuff scientists traditionally have thought of as the Big Bang — our universe was in an exotic state, expanding exponentially at an unfathomable rate. It expanded so fast that in about a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second, a chunk of space the size of an atom would have exploded into a size far larger than our solar system. It brought our slice of the universe — everything we can see in the night sky — from an incomprehensibly small point to a size roughly between that of a human head and a city block. But while the modern-day universe is riddled with evidence that this strange prologue to the universe that physicists call "inflation" probably happened, scientists still don't know exactly why it happened. A new spacecraft from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, launching as early as Tuesday evening on a SpaceX rocket out of Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc, hopes to find out. The mission — the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer; or SPHEREx — will examine one of the clues inflation left behind. From its data, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of the culprit (or culprits) behind the rapid expansion. Over the course of two years, SPHEREx will create four three-dimensional maps of the spread of galaxies throughout the entire sky, allowing scientists to search for the subatomic quantum ripples created by undiscovered inflation particles 13.8 billion years ago, now etched into the large-scale structure of the universe. 'It's zooming out to map the cosmos and see the largest structures and the biggest picture, unlike large telescopes like [the James Webb Space telescope] that will zoom in and take very detailed, exquisite pictures over specific small areas of the sky,' said James Bock, Caltech physics professor, JPL senior research scientist and SPHEREx's principal investigator. While the universe has been expanding ever since its first moments, physicists reserve the term "inflation" only for the rapid, exponential expansion governed by unknown physics at the start of the universe as we know it. Inflation still has its detractors who say the inflation process would have needed incredibly unlikely circumstances to kick off in the first place and that — absent the ability to directly detect exotic inflation particles — the current indirect evidence of their existence remains insufficient. However, inflation is widely accepted in the field as the best explanation for a range of strange phenomena throughout our modern universe. The different inflation theories disagree on some numbers and details, but the general story goes like this: Whatever existed before inflation instantly exploded away once the great expansion began. During inflation, no form of matter we know was present yet. Instead, the universe was filled with some unknown inflationary energy and particles. As they fluctuated, they created ripples in the energy field — pockets of higher energy and pockets of lower energy. What's still unclear, though, is what exactly this energy and particle field was, or if there were multiple sets of energy fields and particles at work. But whatever SPHEREx finds will almost certainly have been created by wild particles outside the realm of physics as we know it. When inflation fizzled out, the energy field and its fluctuations transmogrified into an incredibly hot and dense soup of the stuff we know today — eventually becoming the light we see and the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up our world. This hot, dense, nascent universe, under tremendous pressure, exploded outward, as described by the traditional hot Big Bang theory developed in the 1920s. Inflation was physicists' revision for the first few moments of the universe, conceived of in the 1980s to account for some weird effects in the universe. The quantum ripples in the inflation energy seemingly never went away. While they started on the subatomic scale, they're now bigger than galaxies. The higher energy spots turned into bright and busy corners of the universe with plenty of galaxies. The lower energy spots are relative dead zones now. The web of galaxies we see when we look to the sky is a snapshot of the drama that played out in a small subatomic section of space some 13.8 billion years ago. The SPHEREx team thinks there's still more to that drama hidden in the fine details of that web. Read more: Scientists long urged NASA to search for signs of life near Jupiter. Now it's happening The probe will, for the first time, create three-dimensional full-sky maps with enough precision and data to tease out whether it was a single energy field responsible for inflation, or if it was multiple. 'If you throw a tiny pebble into a pond, it creates ripples,' said Spencer Everett, a Caltech research scientist working on the SPHEREx mission. 'Then, inflation suddenly swells them into these massive waves in an ocean.' While single-field inflation theories are analogous to throwing a bunch of same-sized pebbles into the pond, Everett said, multi-field theories are like throwing many different sized pebbles and rocks into the water. By looking at the resulting ripples, scientists should be able to determine whether multiple sizes of pebbles — or inflation particles, in SPHEREx's case — created them. Evidence from SPHEREx that the spread of galaxies in the universe does not look like ripples from a single field (or a single-sized pebble in Everett's analogy) would not only serve as strong proof inflation did in fact happen, but it would also effectively put the single-field theories on their deathbeds. By launching into space, SPHEREx will have unobstructed views of virtually the entire sky as it orbits Earth. SPHEREx also needs to look at infrared wavelengths of light, with slightly longer wavelengths than the color red. However, it's also the wavelength at which most objects, including Earth's ground, radiate heat. 'If you try to measure anything in the infrared on the ground,' said Everett, 'you're just going to see the ground. At the temperatures close to room temperature, everything is emitting in the infrared.' For this reason, the spacecraft will operate at a brisk minus-350 degrees Fahrenheit, kept cool by concentric cone-shaped aluminum shields that look something like a dog cone for a spacecraft. SPHEREx is a medium-class mission in NASA's Explorers Program, designed to provide frequent flight and funding opportunities for space science missions on a less ambitious scale than NASA's flagship missions like the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10-billion mission that launched in 2021 to explore a wide range of pressing space science research questions. The mission will also probe how some of the first galaxies formed and how icy cosmic dust carrying important molecules for life ends up on planets. SPHEREx will ride alongside a small-class Explorers mission — called the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH — that will study solar wind. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
01-03-2025
- Science
- Los Angeles Times
New JPL space mission seeks to unravel the mystery of cosmic ‘inflation'
Before there was light, there was cosmic inflation. Before life, planet Earth, the first galaxies — and even before the violent explosion of hot dense primordial stuff scientists traditionally have thought of as the Big Bang — our universe was in an exotic state, expanding exponentially at an unfathomable rate. It expanded so fast that in about a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second, a chunk of space the size of an atom would have exploded into a size far larger than our solar system. It brought our slice of the universe — everything we can see in the night sky — from an incomprehensibly small point to a size roughly between that of a human head and a city block. But while the modern-day universe is riddled with evidence that this strange prologue to the universe that physicists call 'inflation' probably happened, scientists still don't know exactly why it happened. A new spacecraft from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, launching as early as Tuesday evening on a SpaceX rocket out of Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc, hopes to find out. The mission — the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer; or SPHEREx — will examine one of the clues inflation left behind. From its data, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of the culprit (or culprits) behind the rapid expansion. Over the course of two years, SPHEREx will create four three-dimensional maps of the spread of galaxies throughout the entire sky, allowing scientists to search for the subatomic quantum ripples created by undiscovered inflation particles 13.8 billion years ago, now etched into the large-scale structure of the universe. 'It's zooming out to map the cosmos and see the largest structures and the biggest picture, unlike large telescopes like [the James Webb Space telescope] that will zoom in and take very detailed, exquisite pictures over specific small areas of the sky,' said James Bock, Caltech physics professor, JPL senior research scientist and SPHEREx's principal investigator. While the universe has been expanding ever since its first moments, physicists reserve the term 'inflation' only for the rapid, exponential expansion governed by unknown physics at the start of the universe as we know it. Inflation still has its detractors who say the inflation process would have needed incredibly unlikely circumstances to kick off in the first place and that — absent the ability to directly detect exotic inflation particles — the current indirect evidence of their existence remains insufficient. However, inflation is widely accepted in the field as the best explanation for a range of strange phenomena throughout our modern universe. The different inflation theories disagree on some numbers and details, but the general story goes like this: Whatever existed before inflation instantly exploded away once the great expansion began. During inflation, no form of matter we know was present yet. Instead, the universe was filled with some unknown inflationary energy and particles. As they fluctuated, they created ripples in the energy field — pockets of higher energy and pockets of lower energy. What's still unclear, though, is what exactly this energy and particle field was, or if there were multiple sets of energy fields and particles at work. But whatever SPHEREx finds will almost certainly have been created by wild particles outside the realm of physics as we know it. When inflation fizzled out, the energy field and its fluctuations transmogrified into an incredibly hot and dense soup of the stuff we know today — eventually becoming the light we see and the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up our world. This hot, dense, nascent universe, under tremendous pressure, exploded outward, as described by the traditional hot Big Bang theory developed in the 1920s. Inflation was physicists' revision for the first few moments of the universe, conceived of in the 1980s to account for some weird effects in the universe. The quantum ripples in the inflation energy seemingly never went away. While they started on the subatomic scale, they're now bigger than galaxies. The higher energy spots turned into bright and busy corners of the universe with plenty of galaxies. The lower energy spots are relative dead zones now. The web of galaxies we see when we look to the sky is a snapshot of the drama that played out in a small subatomic section of space some 13.8 billion years ago. The SPHEREx team thinks there's still more to that drama hidden in the fine details of that web. The probe will, for the first time, create three-dimensional full-sky maps with enough precision and data to tease out whether it was a single energy field responsible for inflation, or if it was multiple. 'If you throw a tiny pebble into a pond, it creates ripples,' said Spencer Everett, a Caltech research scientist working on the SPHEREx mission. 'Then, inflation suddenly swells them into these massive waves in an ocean.' While single-field inflation theories are analogous to throwing a bunch of same-sized pebbles into the pond, Everett said, multi-field theories are like throwing many different sized pebbles and rocks into the water. By looking at the resulting ripples, scientists should be able to determine whether multiple sizes of pebbles — or inflation particles, in SPHEREx's case — created them. Evidence from SPHEREx that the spread of galaxies in the universe does not look like ripples from a single field (or a single-sized pebble in Everett's analogy) would not only serve as strong proof inflation did in fact happen, but it would also effectively put the single-field theories on their deathbeds. By launching into space, SPHEREx will have unobstructed views of virtually the entire sky as it orbits Earth. SPHEREx also needs to look at infrared wavelengths of light, with slightly longer wavelengths than the color red. However, it's also the wavelength at which most objects, including Earth's ground, radiate heat. 'If you try to measure anything in the infrared on the ground,' said Everett, 'you're just going to see the ground. At the temperatures close to room temperature, everything is emitting in the infrared.' For this reason, the spacecraft will operate at a brisk minus-350 degrees Fahrenheit, kept cool by concentric cone-shaped aluminum shields that look something like a dog cone for a spacecraft. SPHEREx is a medium-class mission in NASA's Explorers Program, designed to provide frequent flight and funding opportunities for space science missions on a less ambitious scale than NASA's flagship missions like the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10-billion mission that launched in 2021 to explore a wide range of pressing space science research questions. The mission will also probe how some of the first galaxies formed and how icy cosmic dust carrying important molecules for life ends up on planets. SPHEREx will ride alongside a small-class Explorers mission — called the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH — that will study solar wind.
