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NASA to launch space observatory that will map 450M galaxies
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago> four suitcase-sized satellites Americans will use anything else but the metric system :)
- schainks 2y agoHey! I know exactly how many Stanley cups fit in four suitcases, you don't have to tell me twice. </s>
- malfist 2y agoWait, is this carry on sized or checked size? Is it delta's size limits, or are we following united or American Airlines? Or heaven forbid, alligent?
- niwtsol 2y agoThe PUNCH mission features four 140-pound small satellites, each about 1-by-2-by-3 feet in size. Or The PUNCH mission features four 63.5 kg small satellites, each about 0.3048 m × 0.6096 m × 0.9144 m in size. https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/04/nasas-spherex-punch-spacecraft-encapsulated-as-launch-nears/#:~:text=The%20SPHEREx%20observatory%20is%208.5,by%2D3%20feet%20in%20size. https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/04/nasas-spherex-punc...
- Ao7bei3s 2y agoAbout 30x60x90cm in size.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lobsterthief 2y agoBelieve me, many of us wish we were on the metric system. I do a lot of large carpentry projects for fun and wood is produced in inch and foot dimensions—and the most common “beam”, a 2x4, is actually 1.5”x3.5”. You can buy “dimensional lumber” that’s actually 2”x4”, but that’s rare and expensive to find. So putting two 2x4s together doesn’t even make a 4x4 (you end up with 3”x3.5”; a 4x4 is 3.5”x3.5”). Anyways, as I’m doing calculations I’m measuring things like 5/8” or 9/16” and then adding or subtracting large fractions in my head. It’s absolutely stupid. Let alone converting between different units makes most people unable to imagine the relative size of things in distance, weight, or volume. I really believe the US education system would benefit if we switched to metric. It almost happened in the 1970s.
- spwa4 2y ago[flagged]
- shmageggy 2y agoThis is so cool, but I did not see a key piece of info in the article: does the ongoing operation of this mission fall under NASA's science budget and therefore at risk of cuts and defunding under Trump [1]? [1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/white-house-may-seek-to-slash-nasas-science-budget-by-50-percent/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/white-house-may-seek-t...
- ddon 2y agoYep, it looks like it will be cut and closed, which is truly unfortunate. It’s disappointing to see that science nor innovation are not a priority for this administration. And this doge cutting of funding or even shutting down important projects will have long-term consequences, impacting research, education, and technological advancements that benefit everyone.
- bpodgursky 2y agoThis is a proposal (not final) budget to be sent to congress. What congress eventually allocates is what matters.
- jeffgreco 2y agoNot according to the current presidential administration. Impoundment is their stated goal.
- connicpu 2y agoThis one is planned to launch on Falcon so I wouldn't be too surprised if it's one project the administration spares.
- indoordin0saur 2y agoEverything launches on a Falcon these days. No one else can catch up in terms of safety cost or speed.
- dylan604 2y ago"The SPHEREx mission <snip> will map the entire sky four times over two years, offering scientists a chance to study how galaxies form and evolve, and providing a window into how the universe came to be." So each object will be scanned ~6 months from the previous scan. How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable within that 2 year run? My gut response is not much, but that's why we do the science to see the changes. "designed to map the celestial sky in 102 infrared colors " So I'm guessing the coolant used to make IR scanning possible will be the limiting factor on operational time span. This article didn't say where this satellite will be parked either, but wikipedia[0] shows it to be a geosync orbit. Would have been interesting to be able to design a replaceable coolant module to extend the observations to really make seeing the evolution possible. Obviously complexity adds to cost and design time, so of course they didn't. Just dreaming As an example, the study of the stars orbiting around SagA* are very revealing, but have required > 10 years of observations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHEREx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHEREx
- perihelions 2y agoThey're talking about galaxy evolution in the early universe, over timescales of millions of years. Statistics measured across the (large) sample group, not within one galaxy. Scroll down to "It will classify galaxies according to redshift accuracy..."
- nashashmi 2y agoRight, at that scale, For a galaxy to move a fraction of a centimeter will take a thousand years. So not much will be missed in a gap of 6 months.
- queuebert 2y agoThis is nonsensical. Do you mean a tiny movement in the field of view, which should be measured in angular distance? Or do you mean actual motion through the universe, in which case the galaxies are moving at hundreds of kms per second, which means they would move billions of kms in 6 mos.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 2y agoIt always surprises me how my enthusiasm for scientific discovery is affected by fears of a dystopian future. My understanding is that with red shift calibration here we'll get a much better idea of the 'when' in terms of various galactic structures emerged, that might give us an interesting idea of where we are in the life-cycle of the Milky Way. But the observation of water signatures will be the most interesting to me. Presumably there is a lot of water tied up in comets and such, but will SPHERE be able to detect those signatures near planets?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- turtletontine 2y agoThe galactic and extragalactic science cases (meaning, “stuff in the Milky Way” vs “everything inside the Milky Way”) are actually pretty unrelated here. We actually have quite a good idea about the history of the Milky Way and all the smaller galaxies that it’s eaten (and will eat, such as our main current satellites the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds). We’re even pretty sure that the MW merged with another large galaxy about 11bil year ago, sometimes called “Kraken” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_galaxy?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_galaxy?wprov=sfti1. SPHEREx is not interested in any of that, and it looks like it’s galactic science will mostly be mapping out where clouds of ice crystals are in the Milky Way. SPHEREx has very low spatial resolution (about 6 arcsec), so it’s certainly not observing any exoplanets, but that’s the trade off with an all-sky mission like this. One of the big drivers of the extragalactic science, though, is looking for signatures of cosmic inflation in the distribution of galaxies on large scales. IMO this is by far the most interesting science case, and will be genuinely exciting and novel. Its survey design doesn’t give it great resolution, but it’s amazing IR spectrophometry will let it map the rough distribution of galaxies at redshifts we haven’t been able to survey before. This is called intensity mapping
- tiborsaas 2y agoI can't really get what you meant by "dystopian future" in this context. In my understanding that is a human caused concept.
- xyst 2y ago[flagged]
- fernandopj 2y agoUnfounded, IMHO: Musk is obviously a factor in space exploration. Trump founded the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force Also, as soon as China starts to put people on the Moon before Artemis can, I doubt POTUS would let that slide...
- Me1000 2y agoThis administration under through Elon is pushing to cut 50% of NASA's science funding. Mapping galaxies we'll never visit is a purely scientific endeavor. Trump seems to care more about military expansion or for lack of a better term more "masculine" expansion of space. The science stuff is not interesting to him, and I'm honestly not sure I think Musk cares about it that much anymore either.
- kelnos 2y agoI don't think it's unfounded. This mission is purely about science, in the pursuit of understanding our universe, and is unlikely to lead to any military applications (and even if it might, I doubt Trump et al. would have the foresight to see it). From the Musk perspective, he wants to go to Mars. Anything that doesn't contribute to that goal could easily go on the chopping block. Regarding China and the moon, this particular science experiment has nothing to do with that.
- dakr 2y agoTrump 1 mostly targeted climate and Earth science (when it came to NASA funding). Trump 2/Musk is going after everything. They've just shut down the Office of the Chief Scientist at NASA and are planning to cut fully half of the remaining science budget.
- dang 2y agoCould you please stop taking HN threads on generic flamewar tangents? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- layer8 2y agoThe Wikipedia article has more useful information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHEREx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHEREx
- dj_gitmo 2y agoDo these missions ever build back-up hardware? What if the probe is lost because of a lunch mishap, or there is a malfunction during the deploy (see Viasat VS3 antenna deploy failure). It is an added cost, but it cannot be that much compared to the overall R&D/tooling/launch/ect cost.
- kelnos 2y ago> What if the probe is lost because of a lunch mishap Well, hopefully the people who are building the probe aren't eating their lunches on top of it. (Yes, I know. Fun typo nonetheless.)
- mandevil 2y agoInto the 1970's, NASA did that. That was why there was Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, etc. Since then, however, NASA has stopped doing that. It became a balancing act- yes, 0 to 1 is much more expensive than 1 to 2, (1 to n is not quite as cheap as it is with software but it's still much cheaper than 0->1), but NASA Science is in the business of answering questions. The question is, will building, launching, and operating (the expensive part) two Parker Solar Probe's and two Juno's answer more questions than building one Parker Solar Probe, one Juno, and one OSIRIS-Rex? Almost certainly the three different probes answers more questions than two copies of two different probes. So once launch vehicle reliability got to be good enough that the fear of total mission failure went down low enough (1), duplicate missions basically went away. 1: Edited to add: this is actually tied into the Space Shuttle in interesting ways. See T.A. Heppenheimer, _The Space Shuttle Decision_ for why the STS became the sole space launch system for all of the US Government. Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
- dj_gitmo 2y agoGreat answer. > Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary. I wasn't expecting a space shuttle tie in, but of course there would be. They sure had to promise a lot to get that thing off the ground.
- alfiedotwtf 2y agoTo be honest, I was expecting Elon and DOGE to have completely gutted NASA by now, while at the same time allocating more contracts to SpaceX.
- dylan604 2y agoI'd imagine he's currently more focused on FAA to get them off his back about Starship issues. Awarding new contracts doesn't require gutting NASA first, so he can get to it later once the FAA has bent the knee
- dakr 2y agoThey're working on it. NASA HQ has already cut their "Office of the Chief Scientist" (among others) and the current proposal is to cut 50% of the science budget (which would effectively kill it, it's already been squeezed).
- d--b 2y agoThis is a SpaceX contract
- apawloski 2y agoThe launch vehicle is SpaceX, but the science and mission operations are NASA/JPL.
- BHSPitMonkey 2y agoAnd to add to that, DOGE has been known to cancel contracts where the money has already been paid (so we're effective paying for nothing); SpaceX already has what it needs from this contract and has nothing to lose by cancelling the mission now.
- dylan604 2y agoSpaceX might be the one that takes it to orbit, but that's the end of their involvement. It would be one of the NASA run locations that would be controlling the craft, receiving the data, analyzing the data, etc. The JWST is not a French contract just because it caught a ride on an Ariane rocket. To call that a SpaceX contract is a very myopic view.
- temptemptemp111 2y ago[dead]
- rickandmortyy 2y ago[dead]
- metalman 2y ago450M is somewhere between .1% and 0 % of the total number of galaxies in the observable universe, so I am laying claim to 50, galaxies, which is hopefully a full set of galaxie types, but with a little haggling and trading, buying and selling galaxies I can figure that out later. My Mom says as a child she sent away and got title to one sqare inch of the moon, but it was a much smaller universe then, especialy before inflation.
- eleveriven 2y agoImagine the value after cosmic inflation kicks in
- eleveriven 2y agoIt's pretty incredible to think that we're at a point in human history where we can map 450 million galaxies and probe the origins of the universe
- Tepix 2y agoThe Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey has recorded more than one billion galaxies. But there are many more galaxies in the observable universe … somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion
- jajko 2y ago> But there are many more galaxies in the observable universe … somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion A bit less officially, need to remove one zero [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20there,galaxies%20in%20the%20observable%20universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy#:~:text=It%20is%20estim...
- Tepix 2y agoThere are more recent estimates going from 6-20 trillion now: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/galaxies-in-universe/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/galaxies-in-universe...
- hnuser123456 2y agoThat article is going beyond the observable universe, other comments were talking about within it.
- Tepix 2y agoWhat makes you think that? I quote: > "Instead, based on what we see around nearby Milky Way analogues, there ought to be at least 6 trillion galaxies contained within the observable Universe, and it’s plausible that a number that’s more like ~20 trillion"
- nicholasbraker 2y ago“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
- arisAlexis 2y agoI call it here, Musk will cut it before they do it
- _bc2z 2y agoI highly doubt it, but is that plausible?
- lobsterthief 2y agoIt’s possible. But if he thinks his company will benefit (like by launching the things into Space) then he probably won’t. Sad that this is where we are. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- perihelions 2y agohttps://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/12/signal-acquired-nasas-spherex-begins-science-mission/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/12/signal-acquired-na... ("Signal Acquired: NASA’s SPHEREx Begins Science Mission") Success!
- ourmandave 2y agoLike the myth Inuit have 100 words for snow, how many words do astronomers have for big?
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- foobarbecue 2y agoaquisition of signal! https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-launches-missions-to-study-sun-universes-beginning/ https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-launches-missions-to-...