NASA launches new space telescope and suite of solar satellites

Two NASA missions launched from the California coast and soared toward the stars late Tuesday night, overcoming a week of delays to get to orbit. Both aim to unravel mysteries about the universe — one by peering far from Earth, the other by looking closer to home.

The rocket’s chief passenger is SPHEREx, a space telescope that will take images of the entire sky in more than a hundred colors that are invisible to the human eye. Accompanying the telescope is a suite of satellites known collectively as PUNCH, which will study the sun’s outer atmosphere and solar wind.

The launch has been postponed several times since late February for mission specialists to perform additional checks on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and NASA spacecraft. Gloomy weather also contributed to a scrubbed launch on Monday night. But that was forgotten Tuesday as SPHEREx and PUNCH lifted off from the Vandenburg Space Force Base against the black expanse of clear California sky at 11:11 p.m. Eastern time.

Roughly two minutes later, the rocket’s reusable booster separated from the upper stage and flipped back toward Earth for a controlled landing near the launch site.

Forty-two minutes into the launch, SPHEREx floated away from the rocket’s upper stage. The four PUNCH satellites, released in pairs, followed suit about 10 minutes later. In the hours that followed, mission control teams on the ground established communications with the spacecraft as they orbited approximately 400 miles above Earth’s terminator, the line separating day and night on our planet, and over the north and south poles. This type of orbit is known as sun-synchronous because it keeps the spacecraft oriented in the same position relative to our sun.

That’s advantageous for both spacecraft. PUNCH will have a clear view of the sun around all times, while SPHEREx will stay pointed away from it, avoiding light from our home star that could mask fainter signals from faraway stars and galaxies.

SPHEREx is short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. The mouthful of a name is fitting for the vastness of its goal: to survey the entire sky in 102 colors, or wavelengths, of infrared light.

“It’s really the first of its kind,” said Olivier Doré, a cosmologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the mission’s project scientist. By contrast, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which retired in 2011, mapped the sky in just four hues of infrared.

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