Months after arriving in orbit thanks to a Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, NASA’s newest space telescope has started collecting images of the universe. 

The craft known as SPHEREx — Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer — shared a ride with another NASA mission for the trek on March 11.

NASA’s newest space observatory began regular science operations May 1, gathering about 3,600 images per day. Images from the sky survey will be added to public archives on a weekly basis, making it available to everyone.

“Because we’re looking at everything in the whole sky, almost every area of astronomy can be addressed by SPHEREx data,” said Rachel Akeson, the lead for the SPHEREx Science Data Center that’s part of a facility for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech in Pasadena.

While not the first mission to map the sky, SPHEREx observations involve 102 wavelengths, or colors, of infrared light, which are undetectable to the human eye.

By comparison, a now-retired craft collected images in just four wavelength bands.

Scientists intend to use the new data to study the distribution of frozen water and organic molecules — all considered the “building blocks of life” — in the Milky Way.

Releasing SPHEREx data in a public archive should lead to far more astronomical studies than the team alone could complete, officials said.

“By making the data public, we enable the whole astronomy community to use SPHEREx data to work on all these other areas of science,” Akeson said.

Since arriving in low-Earth orbit, SPHEREx spent six weeks getting checked out and undergoing calibration to make sure it was ready to begin work.

The first images have delighted scientists involved in the mission for years. 

“Some of us have been working toward this goal for 12 years,” said Jamie Bock, the mission’s principal investigator at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “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.”

SPHEREx images will appear in the public archive within 60 days after the telescope collects each observation, officials said.

The delay will allow the SPHEREx team to process the raw data to remove or flag artifacts and align the images to the correct astronomical coordinates.

Procedures employed to process the data also will be provided with the images.

“We want enough information in those files that people can do their own research,” Akeson said.

During its 25 months of operations, the observatory is expected to complete more than 11,000 orbits, circling Earth about 14½ times a day

SPHEREx will survey the entire sky twice a year, meaning it will create four all-sky maps in its two years of operation. 

After the mission reaches the one-year mark, the team plans to release a map of the entire sky at all 102 wavelengths, according to NASA.