NASA’s upcoming SPHEREx space telescope mission will map the entire sky like no spacecraft before it. To do that, SPHEREx needs specialized hardware. Three concentric cones called photon shields surround the telescope and block light and heat from the Sun and Earth. Without those shields, the telescope’s detectors would be blinded.

SPHEREx also needs to be cold because it detects infrared light. Invisible to human eyes, infrared is emitted by warm objects on Earth and out in the universe. It’s also emitted by the telescope. Keeping it cold reduces the infrared glow, which lets SPHEREx see faint objects that are really far away.

SPHEREx stands for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, SPHEREx is set to launch no later than April 2025.

For more information about the SPHEREx mission, visit: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/sph...