Seoul, March 12 The SPHEREx -- a space telescope jointly developed by South Korea and the US -- has entered an initial operation stage following its successful launch Wednesday, Seoul's aerospace agency said.
The SPHEREx was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 12:10 p.m. Wednesday (Korea time) on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, according to the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA), Yonhap news agency.
The SPHEREx observatory was detached from the rocket about three minutes after the launch and succeeded in communicating with Svalbard Ground Station in Norway, one of the NASA near space networks, at 1:30 p.m., it said.
“Deployment of NASA’s SPHEREx Observatory complete, beginning the telescope’s two-year mission to collect data on more than 450 million galaxies and 100+ million stars in the Milky Way,” SpaceX said in a post on social media platform X.
The 300 billion won ($488 million) telescope will survey the whole sky over its two-year mission after a 37-day initial operation in order to help scientists study how the universe formed and evolved, it said.
The SPHEREx telescope was jointly developed by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) and NASA. KASI is a research institute that belongs to KASA. SPHEREx will become the world's first space observatory to provide an all-sky spectral survey and collect data on more than 450 million galaxies in the Milky Way.
Meanwhile, KASA has said it aims to kick start preparations to develop technologies needed to explore the moon in 2032 construct a lunar base in the 2040s, and further land a spacecraft on Mars by 2045.
The S. Korean space agency will also strengthen its partnership with global space powers, such as the US, Europe, and Japan, expanding its participation in the NASA-led Artemis Moon exploration project.
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