NASA new space telescope is now mapping the entire sky in 3D

NASA has announced that its new space observatory has completed its calibration phase and has begun mapping the entire night sky in 3D.

The space agency has explained in a new blog post that the SPHEREx observatory, which was launched on March 11, has recently completed its six-week-long calibration and checkout phase and has now begun snapping images of the entire night sky. NASA emphasizes this space observatory won't be taking photos of portions of the night sky; it will be the entire sky, with the goal of mapping the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to "answer some big questions about the universe."

NASA says that operations for SPHEREx began on May 1, which involves the observatory taking approximately 3,600 images per day for the next two years. SPHEREx is positioned in Earth's orbit and throughout its planned 25 months of observations it will complete more than 11,000 orbits of Earth, circling the planet we call home about 14 and a half times per day. The hundreds of thousands of images SPHEREx will capture over its two-year period will be digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps.

"We're going to study what happened on the smallest size scales in the universe's earliest moments by looking at the modern universe on the largest scales. I think there's a poetic arc to that," said Jim Fanson, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California

"Some of us have been working toward this goal for 12 years. The performance of the instrument is as good as we hoped. That means we're going to be able to do all the amazing science we planned on and perhaps even get some unexpected discoveries," said Jamie Bock, the mission's principal investigator at Caltech and JPL