A New EYE On The Universe

NASA’s newest astrophysics observatory, SPHEREx, is studying the origins of the universe. Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx launched into space in March 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Using a technique called spectroscopy, the observatory is measuring the distance to hundreds of millions of galaxies and a rich diversity of astronomical phenomena. 

Its mission is to create a 3D map of the entire celestial sky every six months over a two-year period. This broad view will complement the work of space telescopes such as NASA’s James Webb and Hubble, which focus on smaller regions of the sky in greater detail.

SPHEREx is a collaboration managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in partnership with the California Institute of Technology. The mission science team includes participants from the United States, South Korea, and Taiwan. 

The JPL High Performance Computing service, Caltech/IPAC, the NEID spectrometer project, and TACC collaborated to collectively implement the first automated mission data pipeline. SPHEREx offered the next opportunity to implement such a pipeline for science data processing. The pipeline uses TACC’s robust infrastructure services to provide periodic high throughput computing.