"Our spacecraft has opened its eyes on the Universe," says Olivier Doré, project scientist for NASA's SPHEREx space telescope.
This brand new observatory is tasked with taking astronomers to just a fraction of a second after the creation of the Universe, to learn the secrets of the Big Bang.
These images are the first views of the Universe by SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), and came as scientists switched on its detectors in space for the first time.
About the SPHEREx images
These images are not ready for scientific use, but they're showing the mission scientists that SPHEREx is working as it should.
Each bright spot in the images could be a star or galaxy, and each image is thought to contain over 100,000 detected sources.
The images are processed in different colours to represent different wavelengths of light.
There are six images in every SPHEREx exposure, amounting to one for each detector.
The top row of images show the same area of sky as the bottom row of images, and amounts to SPHEREx's full field of view, which is about 20 times wider than the full Moon.
SPHEREx will begin routine science in late April 2025 and will take about 600 exposures every day.
What SPHEREx will do
SPHEREx is tasked with topics such as working out what was going on in the Universe just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and tracing the origins of water in our Galaxy.
It can break down colour from cosmic objects into separate wavelengths of light to reveal the composition of that object or the distance to a galaxy.
This technique is known as spectroscopy, and SPHEREx will collect light from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies in more wavelengths any other all-sky survey telescope.
SPHEREx has a broad view of the Universe and will map the whole sky four times during a two-year prime mission.
"This is the high point of spacecraft checkout; it’s the thing we wait for," says Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx deputy project manager at NASA JPL.
"There’s still work to do, but this is the big payoff. And wow! Just wow!"
"Based on the images we are seeing, we can now say that the instrument team nailed it," says Jamie Bock, SPHEREx’s principal investigator at Caltech and JPL.
"I’m rendered speechless," says Jim Fanson, SPHEREx project manager at JPL.
"There was an incredible human effort to make this possible, and our engineering team did an amazing job getting us to this point."
