Searching the entire sky for the secrets to our universe

Searching the entire sky for the secrets to our universe toggle caption BAE Systems/NASA/JPL-Caltech As soon as the end of February, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will launch a new telescope into orbit around the Earth called SPHEREx. "It weighs a little less than a grand piano and uses about 270, 300 watts of power — less than a refrigerator," said Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx's deputy project manager, at a press conference in late January. SPHEREx, by contrast, "has a very large field of view and we see the entire sky twice each year," said Fabinsky. Sponsor Message "And that expansion expanded tiny fluctuations smaller than an atom to enormous cosmological scales that we see today traced out by galaxies," said Jamie Bock, SPHEREx's principal investor based at CalTech, who also spoke at the press conference. Sponsor Message "This is a topic of some interest for us on Earth," said Bock, "because the water we see here on Earth's oceans — astronomers believe that initially came from these interstellar reservoirs of ices."