On March 11, a Falcon 9 rocket was launched from the Vandenberg Space Center. It successfully launched two NASA missions called SPHEREx and PUNCH into orbit. They will study the origin of our Universe and the solar wind.
SPHEREx mission: a glimpse into the past of the Universe
SPHEREx is a 178-kilogram vehicle equipped with an infrared telescope with a 20-centimeter mirror. At first glance, against the background of the same James Webb, its technical abilities look extremely modest. However, SPHEREx has an extremely wide field of view. Thanks to this, it will be able to determine the exact position of 450 million galaxies in the nearby Universe. Their large-scale distribution was influenced by an event that occurred nearly 14 billion years ago known as inflation. As a result, the Universe radically increased in size in just a trillion-trillionfold of a second after the Big Bang.
The telescope will not only determine the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies, but will also decompose the light of each into a spectrum and determine the intensity of the radiation at different wavelengths. This will provide new insights into how the large-scale structure of the Universe formed and evolved.
In addition, scientists hope to learn more about the Epoch of Reionization. It came a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. It was then when the first stars erupted, and their radiation ionized the interstellar gas, making the Universe transparent.
But SPHEREx will observe more than just distant galaxies. It will also explore our Milky Way in search of hidden reservoirs of frozen water ice and other molecules, such as carbon dioxide, that are essential for life as we know it. In addition, astronomers expect to learn more about the icy objects that lurk on the outskirts of our Solar System. This may shed light on the question of how water got to Earth.
PUNCH mission: solar wind explorer
Along with SPHEREx, the PUNCH mission’s four small 40-kilogram satellites also made the trip into orbit. Once they are in the correct orbital positions and their instruments are calibrated, they will form a single virtual instrument designed to study the solar wind.
PUNCH will make global, three-dimensional observations of the interior of the Solar System and the outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere (the corona) to learn how its mass and energy are transformed into the solar wind, a stream of charged particles ejected by the Sun in all directions. In other words, the goal of the mission is to understand how the solar corona becomes the solar wind.
The mission will also study the formation and evolution of space weather phenomena, such as coronal mass ejections, which can pose a risk to satellites and astronauts. This data will be useful to space technology designers when planning manned missions to deep space.
According to NASA
