NEW YORK, March 12: NASA’s newest space missions, SPHEREx and PUNCH, are off to space, launching together aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 11:10 p.m. ET (8:10 p.m. PT) on Tuesday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Despite earlier delays caused by weather and integration issues, both missions are now on their way to space, with SPHEREx designed to explore the key ingredients for life in the Milky Way, and PUNCH focused on studying the Sun.

The two missions, although focused on entirely different scientific objectives, were launched together as a cost-effective way to send “more science into space,” according to Dr. Nicky Fox, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Both spacecraft are headed to a similar location: a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth’s poles, where each mission will maintain the same orientation relative to the Sun throughout the year.

SPHEREx, which stands for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, is designed to investigate how the universe has evolved and to search for the key ingredients necessary for life across the cosmos. Its primary mission is to create a map of the sky in 102 colors of infrared light, a range of light invisible to the human eye, to study stars and galaxies. SPHEREx will scan hundreds of millions of galaxies, including over 100 million stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, helping scientists better understand cosmic inflation and the origins of the universe after the Big Bang.

“We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colors,” said Jamie Bock, SPHEREx principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The mission will also focus on mapping the glow of light emitted by all galaxies, including those too distant and faint for other telescopes to detect. One of its main goals is to look for the ingredients necessary for life, such as water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, in the gas and dust clouds that give rise to stars and planets.

SPHEREx is designed to complement the James Webb Space Telescope. While Webb focuses on detailed observations of small sections of the sky, SPHEREx will conduct large-scale surveys. This combination will allow scientists to connect fine details with a broader perspective. If SPHEREx discovers something of interest, the Webb or Hubble Space Telescopes can follow up with more detailed observations.

PUNCH, or Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, is a constellation of four small spacecraft designed to study the Sun and its outer atmosphere, the corona, as well as the solar wind—energized particles that stream out from the Sun. Each of the four PUNCH satellites is equipped with a camera and polarizing filters, which are similar to polarized sunglasses, enabling them to make maps of features in the Sun’s corona and across the solar system.

The goal of PUNCH is to observe how the Sun’s outer atmosphere transitions into the solar wind and to understand how this process affects the entire solar system. PUNCH will also work in tandem with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, to capture both close-up details and broader views of the Sun’s activity. This collaboration is expected to provide groundbreaking insights into how solar storms and space weather evolve.

PUNCH will operate at a crucial time during solar maximum, the peak of the Sun’s 11-year cycle, when solar flares and storms are expected to be at their most intense. The data collected by PUNCH will help scientists predict when space weather might impact Earth, including disruptions to communication satellites and power grids, and the creation of auroras near the poles.

“What we hope PUNCH will bring to humanity is the ability to really see, for the first time, where we live inside the solar wind itself,” said Craig DeForest, PUNCH principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute.

The launch of both SPHEREx and PUNCH, while focusing on different areas of space science, serves to enhance NASA’s understanding of both the universe and our Sun. “PUNCH is the latest heliophysics addition to the NASA fleet that delivers groundbreaking science every second of every day,” said Joe Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division. “Launching this mission as a rideshare bolsters its value to the nation by optimizing every pound of launch capacity to maximize the scientific return for the cost of a single launch.”

Both missions promise to provide essential insights into the universe’s history, the formation of life, and the complex interactions within our solar system, paving the way for new discoveries in space exploration.