NASA approved the final plans for its next solar mapmaking mission. The SPHEREx project will launch no later than 2025 and will be capable of scanning the entire sky every six months. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) stated that this will result in “a map of the cosmos unlike any before”.

The space observatory will be situated in Low Earth Orbit and perform an all-sky survey in the near infrared spectrum with a 200mm main telescope. The mission will create a map of the entire sky in 96 different colour bands, far exceeding the colour resolution of previous all-sky maps. It also will identify targets for more detailed study by future missions, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

A spokesperson for the JPL explained, “To answer big questions about the universe, scientists need to look at the sky in different ways. Many telescopes, like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, are built to focus on individual stars, galaxies, or other cosmic objects, and to study them in detail. But SPHEREx (which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionisation and Ices Explorer) belongs to another class of space telescopes that quickly observe large portions of the sky, surveying many objects in a short period of time.

“SPHEREx will scan over 99% of the sky every six months; by contrast, Hubble has observed about 0.1% of the sky in more than 30 years of operations. Although survey telescopes like SPHEREx can’t see objects with the same level of detail as targeted observatories, they can answer questions about the typical properties of those objects throughout the universe.”

NASA’s newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope will look intently at individual exoplanets to measure their size, temperature, weather patterns at composition. But SPHEREx will be able to learn where exoplanets are likely to form on average, how prevalent water is in galactic dust clouds and other questions relating to aggregation.