NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory, which launched into low Earth orbit on March 11, has opened its eyes to the sky. On March 18, the mission team commanded the spacecraft to eject the protective dust cover that shielded the telescope opening. Once science operations begin several weeks from now, SPHEREx (short for Specto-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) will map the entire celestial sky to answer fundamental questions about the universe.Measuring about 25 inches by 16 inches (64 centimeters by 40 centimeters), the cover kept particles and moisture off key pieces of hardware, including three telescope mirrors. To complete the ejection, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California sent a command to SPHEREx that activated two mechanical release mechanisms on the protective lid, and springs helped push it away from the observatory. After being ejected, the cover began to float away and will eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.The mission won’t power on the spacecraft’s camera until it has cooled to its operating temperature, which is colder than minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (about minus 190 degrees Celsius). So to confirm the cover’s removal, team members observed a change in SPHEREx’s orientation — essentially, a slight jiggle of the observatory after each mechanism release. Shortly after the second jiggle, the telescope’s temperature began to drop, indicating it was exposed to the cold of space as planned.
NASA’s SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) has turned on its detectors for the first time in space. Initial images from the observatory, which launched March 11, confirm that all systems are working as expected.Although the new images are uncalibrated and not yet ready to use for science, they give a tantalizing look at SPHEREx’s wide view of the sky. Each bright spot is a source of light, like a star or galaxy, and each image is expected to contain more than 100,000 detected sources.There are six images in every SPHEREx exposure — one for each detector. The top three images show the same area of sky as the bottom three images. This is the observatory’s full field of view, a rectangular area about 20 times wider than the full Moon. When SPHEREx begins routine science operations in late April, it will take approximately 600 exposures every day.“Our spacecraft has opened its eyes on the universe,” said Olivier Doré, SPHEREx project scientist at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Southern California. “It’s performing just as it was designed to.”The SPHEREx observatory detects infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. To make these first images, science team members assigned a visible color to every infrared wavelength captured by the observatory. Each of the six SPHEREx detectors has 17 unique wavelength bands, for a total of 102 hues in every six-image exposure.Breaking down color this way can reveal the composition of an object or the distance to a galaxy. With that data, scientists can study topics ranging from the physics that governed the universe less than a second after its birth to the origins of water in our galaxy.“This is the high point of spacecraft checkout; it’s the thing we wait for,” said Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx deputy project manager at JPL. “There’s still work to do, but this is the big payoff. And wow! Just wow!”During the past two weeks, scientists and engineers at JPL, which manages the mission for NASA, have executed a series of spacecraft checks that show all is well so far. In addition, SPHEREx’s detectors and other hardware have been cooling down to their final temperature of around minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (about minus 210 degrees Celsius). This is necessary because heat can overwhelm the telescope’s ability to detect infrared light, which is sometimes called heat radiation. The new images also show that the telescope is focused correctly. Focusing is done entirely before launch and cannot be adjusted in space.“Based on the images we are seeing, we can now say that the instrument team nailed it,” said Jamie Bock, SPHEREx’s principal investigator at Caltech and JPL.
NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission successfully completed spacecraft commissioning this week, opening its instrument doors to capture “first light”, the mission’s first images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere and the surrounding space. This is the first step in revealing new details of how the solar atmosphere unfolds and streams through the solar system. Now, mission operation teams will continue the commissioning phase for the spacecraft’s instruments.On April 14, the Narrow Field Imager (NFI) and one of the mission’s three Wide Field Imagers (WFI) opened its instrument doors and captured the first images for the mission. On April 16, the remaining WFIs opened their doors and also started capturing images. The first NFI image shows star fields with the Sun near the center of the image. The image was filtered to emphasize background star fields, which was obscured by zodiacal light, a very faint diffuse glow from dust orbiting the Sun.Throughout the commissioning phase, scientists will be calibrating this view to better reveal details the Sun’s corona, or wispy outer atmosphere. This calibration process will remove about 99% of the light from the corona, enabling scientists to track the faint threads of solar material as they flow outward throughout space.The WFI image below, taken April 14, shows the wide field of view from WFI and is marked with labeled constellations. As commissioning progresses, the PUNCH team will be removing the star fields and other background light from all images to highlight the faint stream of solar wind as it travels toward Earth.These early images confirm a crucial milestone: the cameras onboard PUNCH’s four satellites are in focus and functioning as designed.The PUNCH mission will make global, 3D observations of the inner solar system and the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, to learn how its mass and energy become the solar wind, a stream of charged particles blowing outward from the Sun in all directions. The mission will explore the formation and evolution of space weather events such as coronal mass ejections, which can create storms of energetic particle radiation that can endanger spacecraft and astronauts.During this first phase of the commissioning period, the team at mission control at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, worked to assure that the four satellites were functioning correctly and are moving into the proper orbit around Earth and distance from each other to create the PUNCH constellation.The PUNCH satellites include one NFI and three WFIs. The NFI is a coronagraph, which blocks out the bright light from the Sun to better see details in the Sun’s corona. The WFIs are heliospheric imagers that view the very faint, outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind itself. Once the PUNCH satellites reach their targeted alignment, the images from these instruments will be stitched together to create the wide view of the journey of the Sun’s corona and solar wind to Earth.Once the commissioning is complete, PUNCH will provide the first-ever imagery of the solar wind and coronal mass ejections in polarized light, enabling scientists to discern new information about this activity.
After weeks of preparation, the space observatory has begun its science mission, taking about 3,600 unique images per day to create a map of the cosmos like no other.Launched on March 11, NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory has spent the last six weeks undergoing checkouts, calibrations, and other activities to ensure it is working as it should. Now it’s mapping the entire sky — not just a large part of it — to chart the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to answer some big questions about the universe. On May 1, the spacecraft began regular science operations, which consist of taking about 3,600 images per day for the next two years to provide new insights about the origins of the universe, galaxies, and the ingredients for life in the Milky Way.“Thanks to the hard work of teams across NASA, industry, and academia that built this mission, SPHEREx is operating just as we’d expected and will produce maps of the full sky unlike any we’ve had before,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This new observatory is adding to the suite of space-based astrophysics survey missions leading up to the launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Together with these other missions, SPHEREx will play a key role in answering the big questions about the universe we tackle at NASA every day.”From its perch in Earth orbit, SPHEREx peers into the darkness, pointing away from the planet and the Sun. The observatory will complete more than 11,000 orbits over its 25 months of planned survey operations, circling Earth about 14½ times a day. It orbits Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and each day it takes images along one circular strip of the sky. As the days pass and the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx’s field of view shifts as well so that after six months, the observatory will have looked out into space in every direction.When SPHEREx takes a picture of the sky, the light is sent to six detectors that each produces a unique image capturing different wavelengths of light. These groups of six images are called an exposure, and SPHEREx takes about 600 exposures per day. When it’s done with one exposure, the whole observatory shifts position — the mirrors and detectors don’t move as they do on some other telescopes. Rather than using thrusters, SPHEREx relies on a system of reaction wheels, which spin inside the spacecraft to control its orientation.Hundreds of thousands of SPHEREx’s images will be digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps in two years. By mapping the entire sky, the mission will provide new insights about what happened in the first fraction of a second after the big bang. In that brief instant, an event called cosmic inflation caused the universe to expand a trillion-trillionfold.“We’re going to study what happened on the smallest size scales in the universe’s earliest moments by looking at the modern universe on the largest scales,” said Jim Fanson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “I think there’s a poetic arc to that.”Cosmic inflation subtly influenced the distribution of matter in the universe, and clues about how such an event could happen are written into the positions of galaxies across the universe. When cosmic inflation began, the universe was smaller than the size of an atom, but the properties of that early universe were stretched out and influence what we see today. No other known event or process involves the amount of energy that would have been required to drive cosmic inflation, so studying it presents a unique opportunity to understand more deeply how our universe works.“Some of us have been working toward this goal for 12 years,” said Jamie Bock, the mission’s principal investigator at Caltech and JPL. “The performance of the instrument is as good as we hoped. That means we’re going to be able to do all the amazing science we planned on and perhaps even get some unexpected discoveries.”Color FieldThe SPHEREx observatory won’t be the first to map the entire sky, but it will be the first to do so in so many colors. It observes 102 wavelengths, or colors, of infrared light, which are undetectable to the human eye. Through a technique called spectroscopy, the telescope separates the light into wavelengths — much like a prism creates a rainbow from sunlight — revealing all kinds of information about cosmic sources.For example, spectroscopy can be harnessed to determine the distance to a faraway galaxy, information that can be used to turn a 2D map of those galaxies into a 3D one. The technique will also enable the mission to measure the collective glow from all the galaxies that ever existed and see how that glow has changed over cosmic time.And spectroscopy can reveal the composition of objects. Using this capability, the mission is searching for water and other key ingredients for life in these systems in our galaxy. It’s thought that the water in Earth’s oceans originated as frozen water molecules attached to dust in the interstellar cloud where the Sun formed.The SPHEREx mission will make over 9 million observations of interstellar clouds in the Milky Way, mapping these materials across the galaxy and helping scientists understand how different conditions can affect the chemistry that produced many of the compounds found on Earth today.
• Orbit injection was spot on, within ~200 m from the required orbit[...]FIRST LIGHT ON MARCH 27TH 2025!• From this image and the previous days, we could tell right away that:➡ The covered deployed and is tracked➡ MOI is within 2% from the ground estimate➡ The instrument is in focus➡ The cooling is nominal and we are now the coolest object ever in LEO (past DIRBE)➡ The decontamination worked well and there is no ice on the mirror➡ Detector electronics performs nominally➡ Photo-current and gains are just as expected given our ground testing campaign➡ On-board processing is working perfectly➡ PAH (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons) and other Galactic emission lines abound!• Mini-survey practice are now on-going• Further observations are planned in the coming two weeks to fully test the spacecraft andfully quantify the above• The science survey should start the second half of April
As instrument commissioning and calibration checks continue for NASA’s newly launched PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, its four spacecraft continue to deliver new images — including its first rainbow-colored view of the sky and the first images taken by two of its instruments.The goal of PUNCH is to reveal new details of how the solar atmosphere, or corona, unfolds and streams through the solar system as the solar wind. It is the first mission designed to measure the corona and solar wind in three dimensions by studying the polarization of light, which is the direction light travels after it has been scattered by particles. In PUNCH’s images, the polarization is revealed through color coding, resulting in a rainbow image that gives scientists new insight on the solar wind’s movement.Collectively, PUNCH’s four satellites include one Narrow Field Imager (NFI) and three Wide Field Imagers (WFIs). The NFI is a coronagraph, which blocks out the bright light from the Sun to better see details in the Sun’s corona. The WFIs are heliospheric imagers that view the very faint, outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind itself.The mission’s fully processed science data will stitch together views from all four spacecraft and remove artifacts from the background of space and the cameras themselves. These early images help the mission team confirm that PUNCH’s cameras are in focus, working properly, and able to capture the quality observations needed to achieve the mission’s goals. Throughout the remainder of the commissioning phase, scientists will calibrate the instruments’ views to reveal illuminating details the Sun’s corona.
NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission has released its first images of large solar eruptions called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. The images were presented Tuesday at the 246th American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.The images, stitched into a video, show giant CMEs, growing as they travel across the inner solar system. The mission’s highly sensitive, wide-field instruments were able to capture the whole CMEs, as they evolved in space, in much greater detail than previously possible. This big-picture view is essential to helping scientists better understand and predict space weather, which is driven by CMEs and can disrupt communications, endanger satellites, and create auroras at Earth. The series of new images also show Venus, Jupiter, several constellations including Orion, and the Pleiades star cluster. The Moon can also be seen in the sequence of images. The images were taken with PUNCH’s four cameras, which work together as a single “virtual instrument.” Three Wide Field Imagers, which observe the faint, outermost portion of the Sun’s atmosphere and solar wind (the continual stream of charged particles from the Sun), work with a Narrow Field Imager (NFI), a coronagraph which allows scientists to see details in the Sun’s atmosphere by blocking out the bright light of the Sun itself. A still image from NFI reveals the intricate, detailed structure of a CME departing the Sun on June 3. The four cameras are hosted across PUNCH’s four satellites.“These first images are astonishing, but the best is still yet to come,” said Craig DeForest, PUNCH principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. “Once the spacecraft are in their final formation, we’ll be able to routinely track space weather in 3D across the entire inner solar system.”
All four spacecraft of NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission have successfully maneuvered into their final science orbits as of Aug 7.Launched into Earth orbit on March 11, PUNCH’s four suitcase-sized spacecraft are now spread out along the planet’s day-night boundary, giving the mission a continuous, unobstructed view of the Sun and its surroundings. This allows the mission to study how the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, turns into a constant outflow of material that travels across the solar system, called the solar wind.“We want to measure the solar wind globally around the star in near real time,” said PUNCH’s principal investigator, Craig DeForest of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “The planet gets in the way from the point of view of any one spacecraft, so we had to spread them around the planet to look everywhere all at once.”One of PUNCH’s spacecraft hosts a Narrow Field Imager, while the other three each carry a Wide Field Imager. The Narrow Field Imager is a coronagraph, which blocks out the bright light from the Sun to better reveal details in the Sun’s corona. The Wide Field Imagers capture images of the outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind in the inner solar system. The mission then combines these individual views into a wide-field mosaic that allows PUNCH to track space weather events from the Sun all the way to Earth.This sprawling perspective from PUNCH complements observations from other heliophysics missions — such as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, STEREO, SOHO, and CODEX along with the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) Solar Orbiter mission — that examine the corona and solar wind at smaller scales and from different perspectives. Together, these missions provide a more complete picture of the corona and solar wind than we’ve ever had before.“The PUNCH mission provides the global picture that we can combine with all those other missions to really understand this full, connected system between the Sun and the Earth,” said Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.In addition, PUNCH’s early combined views are now available publicly as “Level 2” science data. To bring out details in the faint corona and solar wind, the PUNCH images require multiple steps or “levels” of processing, from 0 (least processed) to 3 (fully processed). Level 2 data are nearly fully processed, and they stitch together images from the different spacecraft into a mosaic, as if they were taken by a single science instrument at the same time.
One of NASA's new PUNCH satellites got smacked by a micrometeorite. You can see bits of debris flying off at bottom left!Fortunately, PUNCH is OK, continuing to monitor storms on the Sun. (Colors here indicate polarization of light in the Sun's corona.)
While testing in-development data visualization tools, Science Operations Center scientist Ritesh Patel noticed this colorful display in preliminary data from the PUNCH constellation. Hue represents direction of polarization, and saturation represents degree of polarization. The extended solar corona is visible against the starfield, with the constellations Libra and Scorpio visible near the Sun at the center of the field of view. At this moment, one of the WFI spacecraft suffered a collision with a micrometeoroid, launching tiny fragments of the spacecraft itself outward through the instrument’s field of view. The fragments can be seen arcing across the field, leaving brilliantly colored tracks as they were captured through the three polarizers in turn.Small debris impacts like this one rattle the spacecraft but generally do not harm PUNCH, which was designed to be able to weather them. Most satellites encounter impacts like this one. Famously, Space Shuttle tiles and even some of the outermost window panes were damaged by orbital-speed impacts with flecks of paint and other tiny grains. But imaging the resulting bits of spacecraft is more rare, as most missions don’t have the wide imaging field of view that WFI does.These tiny pieces of PUNCH aren’t heavy enough to stay in orbit for long: drag forces from the extremely thin atmosphere at PUNCH’s 640 km (400 mile) altitude will make each PUNCH re-enter in about 24 years, but the tiny dust motes pictured here are expected to have re-entered the atmosphere less than a week after they were created.
To study the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, each of the PUNCH mission spacecraft are outfitted with a camera that works with the others as a single “virtual instrument.” One PUNCH spacecraft hosts a Narrow Field Imager, which is a coronagraph designed to block out the bright radius of light from the Sun’s disk to reveal the faint, wispy details of the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere. The other three PUNCH spacecraft each carry a Wide Field Imager that captures images of the outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind. The mission then combines these individual views into a wide-field mosaic that allows PUNCH to track space weather events from the Sun all the way to Earth. In the video, PUNCH captured several CMEs erupting from the Sun’s surface over several weeks. These ejections led to intense geomagnetic storms on Earth, with one particular storm in mid-November rated as G4, or severe. According to NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Space Weather Prediction Center, the G4 rank is the second highest level, indicating elevated risks of serious disturbances to Earth’s magnetic field and increased radiation exposure. Such geomagnetic storms can have a significant impact on human society and technology, from sparking and intensifying auroras to interfering with satellites or triggering power outages. The storm on Nov. 11 resulted in widespread auroras seen as far south as Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida in the United States. Though designed to observe CMEs, the PUNCH spacecraft tracks other objects journeying through our inner solar system. For example, the imagery also captured comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6), top portion of the video, making an appearance when the comet was passing close to Earth.Delivering extra PUNCH with refined imagesThe PUNCH mission’s four suitcase-sized spacecraft are spread out along Earth’s day-night boundary, giving the mission a continuous, unobstructed view of the Sun and its surroundings. This allows the mission to study how the Sun’s corona turns into a constant outflow of material that travels across the solar system, called the solar wind.The solar wind and energetic solar events like flares and CMEs can create space weather effects throughout the solar system. The measurements from PUNCH will provide scientists with new information about how these potentially disruptive events form and evolve. This could lead to more accurate predictions about the arrival of space weather events on Earth and related impacts on humanity’s robotic and human explorers in space.To bring out details in the faint corona and solar wind, PUNCH images require multiple steps or “levels” of processing, from 0 (least processed) to 3 (fully processed). The PUNCH team is now releasing Level 3 data but continues to work on perfecting the imagery.“The current data release is still preliminary, as we continue to refine the ground calibration to the exquisite level we need to reach our final sensitivity,” said Craig DeForest, PUNCH’s principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “This release is a milestone because, although we still have work to do, these are the first data products that can be used directly to track CMEs and other events through the outer solar corona and inner heliosphere.”With each iteration and release, the team is reprocessing prior images downlinked from the mission, so the quality of the PUNCH data products will continuously improve.The PUNCH images are available for download from NASA’s Solar Data Analysis Center, and more information about the data is available at the Southwest Research Institute’s data access page. Scientists also use PUNCH’s observations of the corona and heliosphere in a project known as QuickPUNCH to support space weather forecasting operations.
The infrared observatory circles the Earth, taking 3600 images per day along one strip of the sky. As the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx's field of view shifts so that, in six months, the observatory creates a 360-degree mosaic that covers the entire sky, like this!
