NASA set to launch the space plate telescope to scan the whole of the sky

The latest addition to NASA’s fleet of space telescopes will be launched this weekend and quickly sets up to work on scanning the entire sky in a series of almost infrared wavelengths and collecting rich data on several 450 million galaxies.

SPECTTRO Photomer for The History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (Spherex) will be launched on March 2 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force in California at. 10.09 local time.

It carries a camera with a filter that divides the incuming of light as a prism and radiates different parts of the spectrum of 102 separate color sensors. When the telescope pans around the sky, it slowly collects a complete image pixel of pixel. This strategy allows a relatively small and simple camera without moving parts to do whatever else may require a heavy and expensive package sensors.

“If you scan the sky slowly by moving the telescope incrementally, then after enough time, every pixel in the sky will have observed over a very wide wavelength area, giving you a raw spectrum of every bit of heaven that has never been done before,” says Richard Elis at University College London. “It’s a very small space telescope, but it has so much unique features.”

Ellis says this rich data set allows serendipithous discoveries. “It is likely to find them not -t names,” he says.

The infrared data out of the range of human vision allows researchers to determine how far away objects are and learn about how galaxies are formed and developed. It can also be used to determine the chemical composition of objects, which is by revealing the presence of water and other key ingredients for life.

Something interesting thrown up by Spherex can then be invested in a more focused way using NASA’s existing space -telosing fleet, included the aging but powerful hubble room telescope and the newer James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Christopher Conselice at the University of Manchester, UK, says Spherex will not match the resolution of JWST or produce similar awe -inspiring images, but it will be a “workhorse” for scientific discovery.

“Jwst has the potential to point to part of the sky, take some big pictures [and reveal] Something brand new. And Spherex can’t really do the same, ”he says. “It will be an analysis that is gooir to take years, and it is gooir to cover the sky many, many times.”

SpHerex will circles the Earth 14.5 times a day, turned away from the planet’s surface and complete 11,000 circuits in its two-year life. Three cone -shaped shields will protect its instruments from interference from the radiant heat from the earth and the sun.

Launch on the same rocket will be another NASA mission, Polarimeter to unite Corona and Heliosphere (Punch), which will study the sun’s solar window.