SPHEREx: The Mission to Find the Origin of the Universe
In 2023, NASA will start making an epic map of the universe.
When it comes to origin stories,our universe has a good one. The broadly accepted theory is that between 12 and 14 billion years ago, the visible universe was the size of a grape.
Then, with a bang, it potentially exponentially expanded from a hot dense state into our vast cosmos. While the idea of the Big Bang has been generally accepted since 1980, we still don’t have an idea of how this massive inflation actually happened.
That’s where the SPHEREx mission comes in. Last week, NASA announced a new project that claims the epic title of: Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer.
SPHEREx a $242 million pursuit that will launch in 2023. For two years, the shuttlecock-shaped observatory will circle Earth in an orbit twice as a high as the International Space Station. It’s a mission designed to address three important questions, including: What is the origin of the universe?
“SPHEREx will probe inflation, the rapid expansion of space that is thought to have occurred moments after the Big Bang,” principal investigator James Bock of Caltech tells Inverse. Bock explains that, in addition to rapidly expanding the universe, inflation produces “variations in density that eventually go to the seed the places where galaxies form.”
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