NASA mission to explore the origins of the universe ready to launch with help from RIT

A NASA mission that aims to explore the origin and history of structures in the universe is set to launch in early 2025 with help from RIT.

NASA’s SPHEREx Observatory, or the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, will provide an all-sky spectral survey of galaxies and stars providing scientists with data never before received. SPHEREx also will explore the origin of water in planetary systems.

Michael Zemcov, associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy, is co-investigator on the mission, having helped design, build, and deploy the instrument. By using optical and near-infared light, SPHEREx will create a map of the entire sky in nearly 100 colors through the visible and infared parts of the spectrum, far more than has ever been done before.

“The three science cases the SPHEREx team is interested in speaks to the biggest questions we have as astrophysicists,” said Zemcov. “How did we get here? What was the early universe like? How did life originate?”

As Zemcov explained, scientists will not just have an image of the entire sky, but they will be able to map the three-dimensional position of all the galaxies in the universe, examine what conditions were like just after the Big Bang, and understand how water gets into solar systems.

“It’s unlike anything we’ve ever had in astrophysics,” said Zemcov. “This is really the first time we’re getting all that information at once, and it ends up being an enormous data hypercube, and we’re taking that data and making it public really quickly.”

Zemcov and his team at RIT have expertise in how the instrument works and how to make sure the data are accurate and useable. Gathering the robust data and making it quickly accessible will help astronomer around the world solve age-old questions about the universe.

SPHEREx is led by principal investigator Jamie Bock from the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The team also includes members from UC Irvine, Ohio State University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Argonne National Laboratory, and Johns Hopkins University.

For more information on NASA’s SPHEREx mission, go to the mission’s website.