NASA will launch dual missions to explore solar wind and the 'origins of the universe'

NASA is tentatively scheduled to launch two missions on Sunday: one to study the sun, the other to examine, oh, just the origins of the universe.

“How does the universe work? How did we get here within that universe? And are we alone in that universe?” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters, said at a press conference this week while summarizing the questions the space agency hopes to answer. “Those are big enough where we can’t answer them with one instrument. We can’t even answer them with one mission.”

The dual missions are due to lift off no earlier than Sunday at 10:09 p.m. ET (7:09 p.m. local time) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

What are missions called, specifically?

The Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (or PUNCH) mission will study the sun’s solar wind, according to NASA.

Named for the space agency’s newest telescope, the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (or SPHEREx) mission, “will improve our understanding of how the universe evolved and search for key ingredients for life in our galaxy.”

What’s the goal for PUNCH?

The PUNCH mission is comprised of four small satellites that are designed to create 3D views of the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, as it produces solar wind.

NASA is hoping the satellites will get a clearer picture of eruptions on the sun that trigger solar flares or “coronal mass ejections,” which cause geomagnetic storms — including those responsible for the aurora borealis or northern lights.

“I think PUNCH is going to revolutionize our physical understanding of space weather events and how they propagate through the inner heliosphere on their way to the Earth,” Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said during the press conference.

What about SPHEREx?

According to NASA, SPHEREx will map the entire sky in infrared light and provide the first all-sky spectral survey during its planned two-year mission, serving as an observatory and collecting data on more than 450 million galaxies and over 100 million stars in the Milky Way “in order to explore the origins of the universe.”

To do so, SPHEREx is aiming to capture sweeping images of the cosmos with a panoramic lens that is a bit different from the revered James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA launched in 2021.

“Imagine you’re a photographer that wants to capture wildlife in a forest,” Domagal-Goldman said. “You may take a camera designed to zoom in on a tree, or maybe even a nest and the eggs inside a nest on a tree — that’s what James Webb does. What SPHEREx does is — it’s the panoramic lens. It’s going to give us not that egg in a nest in a tree. It’s going to give us the forest and all the trees within it.”

NASA hopes the SPHEREx’s wider view will help answer key questions about how the universe formed, where water and ice originated and more.

“On Earth, we know that every living creature needs water to survive,” Rachel Akeson, SPHEREx science data center lead, told reporters. “But how and when did that water get here? And how might that work for planets around other stars?”

Other space news, including an update on those ‘stuck’ astronauts

The dual missions come amid a busy stretch for NASA and space exploration in general.

The Blue Ghost — a commercial lunar lander backed by NASA — launched in January as part of a mission to deploy a fleet of scientific instruments to study the moon’s environment before humans eventually return. The unmanned lander will attempt to land on the moon’s surface on Sunday. The last human to land on the moon was in 1972 during NASA's Apollo 17 mission, and the space agency plans to send humans back to the moon this decade — but no earlier than 2027.

NASA also recently announced that astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — who have been aboard the International Space Station since last June — are now scheduled to return to Earth on March 12. NASA said that SpaceX will switch the capsules being used for upcoming astronaut flights in order to be able to bring the pair home.

And Blue Origin, the commercial space flight company founded by Jeff Bezos, announced on Thursday that it will launch an all-women flight later this spring, with Katy Perry, Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez — Bezos’s fiancée — on board.