It required three years of design and construction, a month-long sailing trip across the Pacific, and a 30-ton crane, but the test chamber was customized for NASA’s upcoming Spectrograph for Space History, The Age of Reionization and the Ices Explorer (SPHEREx Space Telescope) has finally arrived at Caltech’s Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Set to launch no earlier than June 2024 and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), SPHEREx will create a completely unique map of the universe containing hundreds of millions of objects, including includes stars, galaxies, star-forming regions, and other cosmic wonders. Unlike any previous map, it will provide images of individual objects and light spectrums for every point in the sky. Spectroscopy can contain a treasure trove of information about a cosmic object, including its chemical composition and age, as well as its distance to distant galaxies.
“SPHEREx uses its unique full-sky spectral map to survey icy biomolecules in regions where stars are born, chart the history of the universe’s galaxy formation, and find look for signs of the Big Bang in the 3-D distribution of distant galaxies,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator James (Jamie) Bocka professor of physics at Caltech and senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA.
But for SPHEREx to do that, it must be able to withstand the rigors of space and thrive there. The custom test chamber at Caltech, built by the Korea Institute of Space and Astronomical Sciences (KASI), a partner in the SPHEREx mission, is about the size of a small SUV and made of stainless steel, The cylindrical chamber will be used to test SPHEREx’s detector (essentially its camera) and optics, the system that collects light from space.
Read all JPL story at their website. One video About the appearance and installation of the test chamber is also available.
More information about the mission
SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division on the Science Mission Directorate in Washington DC. Bock is the mission’s principal investigator. Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, will deliver the spacecraft. Scientific analysis of SPHEREx data will be performed by a team of scientists at 10 research institutes across the United States and South Korea. The data will be processed and stored at IPAC at Caltech. The SPHEREx dataset will be made publicly available.
Written by JPL’s Calla Cofield
Source: Caltech
