Telescopes and Observatories

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    SpaceX Scrubs Launch of NASA SPHEREx and PUNCH Missions

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    The spacecraft, SPHEREx and PUNCH, had been expected to launch on a SpaceX rocket on Saturday.Two NASA missions will have to wait longer for a launch aboard a single rocket. Both aim to unravel mysteries about the universe — one by peering far from Earth, the other by looking closer to home.SpaceX on Saturday night announced on the website X around two hours before the scheduled launch time of 10:09 p.m. Eastern that it needed to continue checking the Falcon 9 rocket that was to lift the vehicles to orbit.The company said it would announce the next launch attempt when it was possible to do so from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.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.What is SPHEREx?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.The space telescope, which looks like a giant megaphone, will record around 600 images each day, capturing light from millions of stars in our cosmic backyard and even more galaxies beyond it. Using a technique called spectroscopy, SPHEREx will separate the light into different wavelengths, like a glass prism splitting white light into a rainbow of colors. The color spectrum of an object in space reveals information about its chemical makeup and distance from Earth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Earth Safe From Asteroid 2024 YR4, NASA Says

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      The odds that the space rock, 2024 YR4, will smash into our planet in 2032 have dropped to nearly zero, leading astronomers to conclude that we are no longer in danger.A NASA video showing the shifting odds that Asteroid 2024 YR4 would crash into Earth.Graphics by Nasa Jpl/cneosAstronomers have been carefully watching 2024 YR4, a space rock with a heightened chance of hitting Earth in 2032. But fear not: NASA announced on Monday that it posed a threat no longer — the odds that the asteroid would smash into our planet have dropped to nearly zero.“I knew this was likely to go away as we collected more data,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “I was sleeping pretty well.”Days after skywatchers reported their observations of 2024 YR4 on Dec. 27, 2024, scientists calculated that it had more than a 1 percent chance of striking Earth — the only large asteroid known to have an impact probability so big.As scientists studied more data on the object, the odds of impact continued to rise through January and February, from 1.2 percent to a peak of 3.1 percent on Tuesday last week.That may sound small, but the probability was higher than any ever recorded by NASA for an object of this size or bigger.Somewhere between 130 and 300 feet wide, 2024 YR4 is big enough to potentially wipe out a city. Early estimates of the asteroid’s trajectory showed it could possibly slam into or explode in the air over large metropolitan areas, including Mumbai, India, and Lagos, Nigeria. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A New Search for Ripples in Space From the Beginning of Time

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      The universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago. What happened in that earliest moment is of intense interest to anyone trying to understand why everything is the way it is today.“I think this question of what happens at the beginning of the universe is a profound one,” said David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports research at the frontiers of mathematics and science. “And what is remarkably exciting to me is the fact that we can do observations that can give us insight into this.”A new $110 million observatory in the high desert of northern Chile, $90 million financed by the foundation, could uncover key clues about what happened after the Big Bang by looking at particles of light that have traveled across the universe since almost the beginning of time.The data could finally provide compelling corroboration for a fantastical idea known as cosmic inflation. It holds that in the first sliver of time after the universe’s birth, the fabric of space-time accelerated outward to speeds far faster than the speed of light.Alternatively, the observatory’s measurements could undercut this hypothesis, a pillar in the current understanding of cosmology.The observatory is named after the foundation and its founders: Jim Simons, the hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist who died on May 10, and his wife, Marilyn, a trained economist. Two of the four telescopes began taking measurements in April, in time for Dr. Simons’s 86th birthday on April 25.Traces of Ancient LightAn illustration shows how light from the early universe might have been polarized by the push and pull of gravitational waves as the universe expanded. The Simons Observatory will search for evidence of this polarization. More