Press Event
SPHEREx and PUNCH Pre-Launch News Conference
Online Falcon 9 Block 5 | SPHEREx & PUNCH
SPHEREx and PUNCH Prelaunch News Conference
- Mark Clampin, acting deputy associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
- David Cheney, PUNCH program executive, NASA Headquarters
- James Fanson, SPHEREx project manager, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Denton Gibson, launch director, NASA’s Launch Services Program
- Julianna Scheiman, director, NASA Science Missions, SpaceX
- U.S. Air Force 1st Lt. Ina Park, 30th Operations Support Squadron launch weather officer
Updates
LL2 • March 7, 2025, 8:31 p.m.
Official Webcast by NASA has started
Cosmic_Penguin • March 6, 2025, 11:13 p.m.
New Press Conference date.
Nosu • March 6, 2025, 8:40 p.m.
News conference delayed, new date TBD
Cosmic_Penguin • March 5, 2025, 12:46 a.m.
New press conference time.
Cosmic_Penguin • March 3, 2025, 11:46 p.m.
New press event time.
Cosmic_Penguin • March 3, 2025, 12:12 p.m.
Delayed to TBD.
Cosmic_Penguin • March 1, 2025, 4:06 a.m.
New event date.
Cosmic_Penguin • Feb. 26, 2025, 11:34 p.m.
Updated event time.
hitura-nobad • Feb. 20, 2025, 6:59 p.m.
Delayed by 1 day to Feb 27th.
hitura-nobad • Feb. 18, 2025, 8:02 p.m.
Added Event
Related Information
Falcon 9 Block 5 | SPHEREx & PUNCH
SpaceX | United States of AmericaVandenberg SFB, CA, USA
March 12, 2025, 3:10 a.m.
Status: Launch Successful
Mission:
SPHEREx is a planned two-year astrophysics mission to survey the sky in the near-infrared light, which, though not visible to the human eye, serves as a powerful tool for answering cosmic questions involving the birth of the universe, and the subsequent development of galaxies. It also will search for water and organic molecules – essentials for life as we know it – in regions where stars are born from gas and dust, known as stellar nurseries, as well as disks around stars where new planets could be forming. Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will share a ride to space with SPHEREx. It consists of four suitcase-sized satellites, which will focus on the Sun’s outer atmosphere (the corona) and how it generates the solar wind. The spacecraft also will track coronal mass ejections – large eruptions of solar material that can drive large space weather events near Earth – to better understand their evolution and develop new techniques for predicting such eruptions.
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