NASA's SPHEREx mission will create the first all-sky spectroscopic survey in the near-infrared, detecting hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. To do this, the SPHEREx space telescope will look outward from low-Earth orbit, circling the planet along its day-night (or terminator) line. This artist's concept depicts the spacecraft's orbital plane in orange, and its field of view in green. Each of the telescope's orbits allows it to image a 360-degree strip of the celestial sky. As Earth's orbit around the Sun progresses, that strip slowly advances, enabling SPHEREx to complete four all-sky maps in two years.

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.

SPHEREx is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Astrophysics Division within the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available.

For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit: science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex