NASA Launch Of SPHEREx And PUNCH Space Missions Delayed

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The agency had planned to launch both missions at the same time on Saturday (March 8) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket; SpaceX is continuing to complete vehicle checkouts, delaying the liftoff.

A new launch date will be announced once confirmed, according to an update posted to SpaceX's website.

The liftoff had been scheduled to occur from Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:09 p.m. EST (7:09 p.m. local time, and 0309 GMT on March 9). This carpool situation came about because of NASA's Launch Services Program , which aims to match various science missions with commercial vehicles in order strike a balance between the taxpayer money and private funding that go into space exploration.

SPHEREx ⁘ which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer ⁘ is a conical white spacecraft constructed to work as a sort of wide-angle version of the James Webb Space Telescope . It'll be working with information-rich infrared light wavelengths emanating from the distant universe just like the JWST does, but it will do so on a much wider scale.

The JWST can peer into the crevices of a faraway galaxy with remarkable resolution, for instance, while SPHEREx will be able to detect the other galaxies around the JWST's single target with its own stellar imaging capabilities.

Meanwhile, PUNCH ⁘ which stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere ⁘ will be searching for secrets of solar dynamics. Made up of four satellites that'll be stationed around our planet, this mission is meant to help scientists understand how the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona , turns into the solar wind . This is important because the solar wind ricochets around the bubble our solar system sits within, known as the heliosphere; the edges of that bubble represent the barrier between our cosmic neighborhood and the rest of the universe.

Decoding how our sun operates in general can offer many benefits to humanity, but the most obvious probably has to do with space weather. Sometimes, for instance, bursts of plasma rip off the sun and turn into what are known as coronal mass ejections , or CMEs, that can barrel toward our planet. This happens relatively often, meaning a CME headed our direction doesn't mean we're in for doomsday, to be clear ⁘ but space weather resulting from such events can indeed affect things like our power grid and the health of astronauts in space.

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