NASA’s SPHEREx Space Telescope Will Seek Life’s Ingredients

“This puzzled us for a while,” said Gary Melnick, a senior astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and a member of the SPHEREx science team. “We eventually realized that SWAS had detected gaseous water in thin layers near the surface of molecular clouds, suggesting that there might be a lot more water inside the clouds, locked up as ice.”

The mission team’s hypothesis also made sense because SWAS detected less oxygen gas (two oxygen atoms bound together) than expected. They concluded that the oxygen atoms were sticking to interstellar dust grains, and were then joined by hydrogen atoms, forming water. Later research confirmed this. What’s more, the clouds shield molecules from cosmic radiation that would otherwise break those compounds apart. As a result, water ice and other materials stored deep in a cloud’s interior are protected.

As starlight passes through a molecular cloud, molecules like water and carbon dioxide block certain wavelengths of light, creating a distinct signature that SPHEREx and other missions like Webb can identify using a technique called absorption spectroscopy.

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In addition to providing a more detailed accounting of the abundance of these frozen compounds, SPHEREx will help researchers answer questions including how deep into molecular clouds ice begins to form, how the abundance of water and other ices changes with the density of a molecular cloud, and how that abundance changes once a star forms.

Powerful Partnerships

As a survey telescope, SPHEREx is designed to study large portions of the sky relatively quickly, and its results can be used in conjunction with data from targeted telescopes like Webb, which observe a significantly smaller area but can see their targets in greater detail.

“If SPHEREx discovers a particularly intriguing location, Webb can study that target with higher spectral resolving power and in wavelengths that SPHEREx cannot detect,” said Melnick. “These two telescopes could form a highly effective partnership.”

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More About SPHEREx

SPHEREx is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for the Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Data will be processed and archived at at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive.

For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:

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