In just six months, NASA's SPHEREx space telescope has done something that would have taken ground-based observatories years: it scanned the entire night sky in infrared, capturing data across 102 different wavelengths. The result is the most detailed 3D map of the cosmos we've ever created—one that lets astronomers see things invisible to human eyes and peer back toward the earliest moments after the Big Bang.
The telescope orbits Earth from pole to pole 14.5 times a day, collecting around 3,600 images in a single strip of sky with each pass. Over six months, it completed a full 360-degree survey. To put that in perspective: SPHEREx captures the entire sky in 102 different colors roughly every six months. That's an enormous amount of information gathered in a short span of time.
What infrared reveals
Infrared light tells a story that visible light can't. Dust clouds and hot gas—the raw materials for forming new stars and planets—emit infrared radiation that SPHEREx detects easily. These cosmic nurseries exist in regions of space that look empty to our eyes, but SPHEREx reveals them in stunning detail. Astronomers can now study how stars and planets actually form, watching these dynamic processes unfold across the universe.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxThe multiwavelength data also allows researchers to measure the distance to hundreds of millions of distant galaxies with new precision. That matters because distance tells us about time: the farther away a galaxy is, the longer its light has traveled to reach us, and the further back in time we're looking. By mapping these distances, astronomers can trace how the universe evolved over the last 14 billion years.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA, noted that SPHEREx's data becomes even more powerful when combined with observations from other missions. Each telescope sees the universe through a different lens—literally—and together they paint a far richer picture than any single instrument could alone.
The mission is just getting started. SPHEREx will complete three more full-sky scans over the next year and a half, and the final dataset will be released online for free. That means astronomers worldwide—not just those at major institutions—will be able to ask new questions of this data for years to come.
