Spaceflight

Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer SPHEREx will

The acronym is a bit of a stretch, but not too bad by NASA standards.

About the size of a subcompact car, SPHEREx will enter a polar orbit around Earth and create a map of the entire sky in 3D, taking images in every direction, like scanning the inside of a globe. The map will contain hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies, showing them in 102 colors (each a different wavelength of light).

Launching as a secondary payload on the same Falcon 9 rocket as SPHEREx will be NASA’s PUNCH mission (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere).

I see that Falcon 9 continues to be the workhorse of the entire western launch industry.

PUNCH is a constellation of four small satellites heading to low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s corona to learn how the mass and energy there become solar wind.