Space telescope, founded 2025
SPHEREx
NASA's SPHEREx maps the whole sky in 102 infrared colors. It finished its first all-sky map in December 2025, and three more passes follow.
- Location
- Low Earth orbit
- Focus
- Cosmology, Galaxies, Astrobiology, Stars, Telescopes and missions
In space
Low Earth orbit
SPHEREx is a NASA Medium-Class Explorer that maps the entire sky in 102 infrared colors, turning every point into a low-resolution spectrum. It launched on March 11, 2025, on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg, began mapping in May 2025 and completed its first all-sky map in December 2025. The principal investigator is James Bock of Caltech (see Caltech Astronomy). NASA selected it in February 2019, and its data are freely public.
Flagship instruments
- A 102-color infrared survey: it records brightness at infrared wavelengths largely blocked by water in Earth’s atmosphere.
- Cadence: about 3,600 images per day, with four all-sky scans planned in the two-year prime mission.
Recent results
In October 2026, SPHEREx spectra of 37 nearby brown dwarfs, spanning temperatures from about 2,200 degrees C down to minus 20 degrees C, showed water, methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in their atmospheres. Only a few dozen brown dwarfs had been studied in such detail from space before, and the team has thousands more to analyze.
What to watch, 2026-2030
- Through about 2027: three further all-sky scans to complete the two-year prime mission.
- Science goals: testing cosmic inflation through the 3D distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies, tracing galaxy evolution, and mapping water and other ices in the Milky Way.
Why scientists are converging here
SPHEREx is cheap, open and complete: every source in the sky gets a spectrum, and anyone can download it. That makes it useful far beyond its core cosmology goals, from stars and brown dwarfs to the icy ingredients relevant to astrobiology. Its all-sky spectra complement the narrow, deep views of JWST.
