NASA's SPHEREx space telescope has been tucked inside a custom-built chamber on and off for the past two months undergoing tests to prepare it for its two-year mission in space. SPHEREx, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, is set to launch into orbit around Earth no later than April 2025.
It will map the entire sky in infrared wavelengths of light, capturing not only images of hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies but spectra for these objects as well. Spectra are created by instruments that break apart light into a rainbow of wavelengths, revealing new details about a cosmic object's composition, distance, and more.
The telescope is tilted to allow SPHEREx to map the entire sky. SPHEREx must carry out its observations without letting sunlight into the thermal system, which means the sun must always be more than 90 degrees off the central axis. If the telescope were pointed straight up, this constraint would leave two holes in the map coverage, located at the north and south ecliptic poles.
Because performing these tests requires simulating the extremely cold vacuum of space, the SPHEREx team enlisted colleagues at the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute to build a specializedfor this purpose. The SUV-sized chamber cools the telescope to about minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit . Last year, the custom chamber was lowered into the basement of Cahill with the help of a 30-ton crane, as seen in a timelapse video. The telescope was then carefully prepared to be placed in the chamber, a process that included wrapping parts of the telescope in a foil material to block out stray light and to keep the telescope cool.
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