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SPHEREx’s Concentric Cones

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A spacecraft with a distinct cone shape sits in a clean room. A person in a white suit that covers them from head to toe shines a penlight on the observatory. The walls of the clean room are lit with blue and red lights.
Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx will create a map of the cosmos like no other. Using a technique called spectroscopy to image the entire sky in 102 wavelengths of infrared light, SPHEREx will gather information about the composition of and distance to millions of galaxies and stars. With this map, scientists will study what happened in the first fraction of a second after the big bang, how galaxies formed and evolved, and the origins of water in planetary systems in our galaxy.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) observatory rests horizontally in this April 2024 image taken at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado. This orientation shows the observatory’s three layers of photon shields – the metallic concentric cones.

Over a two-year planned mission, the SPHEREx Observatory will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe.

Tune in at 12 p.m. EST Jan. 31, 2025, to hear agency experts preview the mission. SPHEREx is targeted to launch no earlier than Feb. 27, 2025.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems

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