If all goes to plan, two NASA missions called “SPHEREx” and “PUNCH” will be sharing a ride to space very soon.
The agency plans to launch both missions at the same time no earlier than Sunday (March 2) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket; liftoff is scheduled to occur from Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:09 p.m. EST (7:09 p.m. local time, and 0309 GMT on March 3). This carpool situation came about because of NASA’s Launch Services Program, which aims to match various science missions with commercial vehicles in order strike a balance between the taxpayer money and private funding that go into space exploration.
If you’re keen, you’ll be able to watch the launch happen live on NASA+, on the agency’s YouTube channel, or right here on Space.com. Now, let’s dive into what exactly SPHEREx and PUNCH will do once they get to the final frontier.
SPHEREx — which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer — is a conical white spacecraft constructed to work as a sort of wide-angle version of the James Webb Space Telescope. It’ll be working with information-rich infrared light wavelengths emanating from the distant universe just like the JWST does, but it will do so on a much wider scale.
The JWST can peer into the crevices of a faraway galaxy with remarkable resolution, for instance, while SPHEREx will be able to detect the other galaxies around the JWST’s single target with its own stellar imaging capabilities.
Meanwhile, PUNCH — which stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere — will be searching for secrets of solar dynamics. Made up of four satellites that’ll be stationed around our planet, this mission is meant to help scientists understand how the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, turns into the solar wind. This is important because the solar wind ricochets around the bubble our solar system sits within, known as the heliosphere; the edges of that bubble represent the barrier between our cosmic neighborhood and the rest of the universe.
Decoding how our sun operates in general can offer many benefits to humanity, but the most obvious probably has to do with space weather. Sometimes, for instance, bursts of plasma rip off the sun and turn into what are known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, that can barrel toward our planet. This happens relatively often, meaning a CME headed our direction doesn’t mean we’re in for doomsday, to be clear — but space weather resulting from such events can indeed affect things like our power grid and the health of astronauts in space.
While waiting for these missions’ launch sequences to commence, if you’d like to read more about each of them, you can check out our detailed explanations about how they work here.
The science of SPHEREx, for instance, provokes intriguing questions, such as why cosmic inflation occurred just after time began and how water arrived on Earth to support life as we know it. PUNCH’s work and observing techniques will also be incredibly interesting, delving into how the property of light called “polarization” can tell us about the directions of different features within our solar wind chamber (including CMEs) and the way an “artificial solar eclipse” will be instrumental in the mission’s success.
