1. Digital cameras, and the computers to analyze images.
2. Space telescopes (Hubble Space Telescope, the first large space telescope, only launched in 1990).
3. The building of massive ground-based telescopes. Before 1993, the largest telescope had a mirror diameter of 6 meters. Now, multiple 30-meter telescopes are under construction. Collecting power goes with the square of the diameter, so this is an increase of 25 times in collecting power!
4. Very recently, the development of gravitational-wave interferometers, which allow astronomers to observe a totally new type of radiation.
But there are many more galaxies in the observable universe … somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion
A bit less officially, need to remove one zero [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy#:~:text=It%20is%20estim...
We actually have quite a good idea about the history of the Milky Way and all the smaller galaxies that it’s eaten (and will eat, such as our main current satellites the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds). We’re even pretty sure that the MW merged with another large galaxy about 11bil year ago, sometimes called “Kraken” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_galaxy?wprov=sfti1. SPHEREx is not interested in any of that, and it looks like it’s galactic science will mostly be mapping out where clouds of ice crystals are in the Milky Way. SPHEREx has very low spatial resolution (about 6 arcsec), so it’s certainly not observing any exoplanets, but that’s the trade off with an all-sky mission like this.
One of the big drivers of the extragalactic science, though, is looking for signatures of cosmic inflation in the distribution of galaxies on large scales. IMO this is by far the most interesting science case, and will be genuinely exciting and novel. Its survey design doesn’t give it great resolution, but it’s amazing IR spectrophometry will let it map the rough distribution of galaxies at redshifts we haven’t been able to survey before. This is called intensity mapping
Success!
So each object will be scanned ~6 months from the previous scan. How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable within that 2 year run? My gut response is not much, but that's why we do the science to see the changes.
"designed to map the celestial sky in 102 infrared colors "
So I'm guessing the coolant used to make IR scanning possible will be the limiting factor on operational time span. This article didn't say where this satellite will be parked either, but wikipedia[0] shows it to be a geosync orbit. Would have been interesting to be able to design a replaceable coolant module to extend the observations to really make seeing the evolution possible. Obviously complexity adds to cost and design time, so of course they didn't. Just dreaming
As an example, the study of the stars orbiting around SagA* are very revealing, but have required > 10 years of observations.
- It is passively cooled rather than using an expendable coolant- "SPHEREx relies on an entirely passive cooling system — no electricity or coolants are used, simplifying the spacecraft’s design and operational needs."
- It is a Medium-Class Explorers (MIDEX) mission - Investigations characterized by definition, development, mission operations, and data analysis costs not to exceed $180 to $200 million total cost to NASA. I think the cost of ground support eats into the budget length. The original estimate for project was $241M, so it was a large MIDEX
- It is in a Polar orbit around Earth at the day-night (terminator) line
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/press-kits/spherex/
https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions.html
https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/02/14/nasa-selects-mission-t...
Because it's launched at a angle greater than a straight north-south 90 degree orbit, so orbital precession will correctly follow the terminator. Depending on the orbital altitude this can be more than 140 degrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
If you're alluding to China, they probably had the data from the Russians anyways.
Otherwise, I'm out of guesses to your vagueness.
Nitpick: It was sort of successful. They built a shuttle, and it successfully flew a single (un-crewed) mission of a couple orbits. The collapse of the USSR / lack of funding killed it.
Hardly hostile. Unless you poke the bear.
Absolute animals. As is anyone else carrying water for these politics. There's no excuse for it.
If you had anything at all to do with putting these clowns in power - reign them back in. They are supposed to work for you. Remind them of this.
[1] https://x.com/benshapiro/status/1876800394900152483?lang=en
So in particular, the 6-month period is not to revisit these distant galaxies more than once to observe spectral changes. The strategy, indeed, is to “stack” the multiple exposures to beat down noise. (Fig.6 of [0], top left).
It is possible that they have designed the system so that it could produce “just good enough” results in 6 months, with one complete scan. This is called a “threshold mission” and it would only be described in the full proposal.
I looked through the rest of the science cases (which are secondary to the driving case of this mission), and none of them seem to be reliant on revisits. (But open to correction on this.)
Anton Petrov had a recent episode about rapid transformations in large supergiant stars, so there are some parts of space that can rapidly evolve.
Or do you mean actual motion through the universe, in which case the galaxies are moving at hundreds of kms per second, which means they would move billions of kms in 6 mos.
- "SPHEREx relies on an entirely passive cooling system — no electricity or coolants are used during normal operations"
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/6-things-to-know-about-spherex...
edit to add:
- "The telescope is passively cooled to below 80 K in low-Earth orbit by three nested V-groove radiators. An additional radiator cools the long wavelength focal plane temperature below 60 K to reduce detector dark current."
"One of the most important advances of this redesign was an Earth-trailing orbit.[1] Cryogenic satellites that require liquid helium (LHe, T ≈ 4 K) temperatures in near-Earth orbit are typically exposed to a large heat load from Earth, and consequently require large amounts of LHe coolant, which then tends to dominate the total payload mass and limits mission life. Placing the satellite in solar orbit far from Earth allowed innovative passive cooling. The sun shield protected the rest of the spacecraft from the Sun's heat, the far side of the spacecraft was painted black to enhance passive radiation of heat, and the spacecraft bus was thermally isolated from the telescope. All of these design choices combined to drastically reduce the total mass of helium needed, resulting in an overall smaller and lighter payload, resulting in major cost savings, but with a mirror the same diameter as originally designed. This orbit also simplified telescope pointing, but did require the NASA Deep Space Network for communications"[0]
(.pdf) https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/71aee1e9-3...
> Notable infrared missions that carried consumable cryogen include IRAS (1983), ISO (1995–1998), Spitzer (2003–2009 in cryo mode), Herschel (2009–2013), WISE (2009–2011 in cryo mode), and Planck (2009–2013). Each relied on a finite liquid helium (or solid hydrogen) supply to keep detectors cold and reverted to a warmer operating mode or ended once their coolant was depleted.
It doesn't change your specific, exact point (about previous cooling systems you were aware of), but it makes the conversation a lot less likely to confuse people IMO.
It is an added cost, but it cannot be that much compared to the overall R&D/tooling/launch/ect cost.
1: Edited to add: this is actually tied into the Space Shuttle in interesting ways. See T.A. Heppenheimer, _The Space Shuttle Decision_ for why the STS became the sole space launch system for all of the US Government. Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
> Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
I wasn't expecting a space shuttle tie in, but of course there would be. They sure had to promise a lot to get that thing off the ground.
Well, hopefully the people who are building the probe aren't eating their lunches on top of it.
(Yes, I know. Fun typo nonetheless.)
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/white-house-may-seek-t...
Superheavy-Starship reusable launches at F9 price would completely destroy everything in space space, but so far the only things it had disrupted are itself and airline services under its flightpath. And even F9 is starting to show increasingly clear signs of repetitive "old space" scrubs as NASA gets more disrupted.
Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
Business can't be done in an environment with zero trust, doesn't matter how much better the offer looks on paper. That trust with spacex is gone for good.
There are all sorts of politicians and military members who advocate for a distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command. If a politician ends up doing that, then he should get credit for creating it even though it has been a long time coming.
It's not 'instead', it's adding a cyber branch to a different org chart. There are two major org charts in the US military:
The services, such as Army, Navy, Space Force, etc., which are generally defined by domain (land, sea, orbit) and whose role is to recruit, organize, train, and equip forces - to prepare them, but not to deploy or command them in operations.
The combatant commands, which are defined by geography - such as Africa Command, Indo-Pacific Command - and sometimes by geography-independent domains, such as as Space Command or Cyber Command. The combatant commands deploy the resources provided by the services in various combinations. Modern conflicts generally require resources from multiple services/domains working jointly.
It makes some sense - you want domain experts to train and equip them for their domain, then you must necessarily deploy them jointly. Who should organize, train, and equip sea-born forces? Probably you want the Navy to do that, not the Army. Who should organize, train, and equip electronic domain forces (I hate the term 'cyber')? Do you want your IT organization organized, trained, and equipped (think of the importance of each step) by the US Marine Corps, or maybe by some actual researchers, engineers, and experienced managers?
Americans will use anything else but the metric system :)
Is it delta's size limits, or are we following united or American Airlines? Or heaven forbid, alligent?
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Or
The PUNCH mission features four 63.5 kg small satellites, each about 0.3048 m × 0.6096 m × 0.9144 m in size.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/04/nasas-spherex-punc...
Musk is obviously a factor in space exploration.
Trump founded the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
Also, as soon as China starts to put people on the Moon before Artemis can, I doubt POTUS would let that slide...
From the Musk perspective, he wants to go to Mars. Anything that doesn't contribute to that goal could easily go on the chopping block.
Regarding China and the moon, this particular science experiment has nothing to do with that.
Awarding new contracts doesn't require gutting NASA first, so he can get to it later once the FAA has bent the knee