SPHEREx: An All-sky Infrared Spectral Survey Explorer Satellite
James J. Bock
Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Physics
Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist
Caltech
About the Lecture
The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (“SPHEREx”) is an all-sky survey satellite launching in early 2025. A mission in NASA’s Medium Explorer (MIDEX) program, it will probe the physics of cosmic inflation, chart the origin and history of galaxy formation, and study the origin of water and biogenic molecules in ices in interstellar space. As a new member of a tradition of all sky missions, SPHEREx will be the first near-infrared survey. It will produce four complete all-sky maps that will serve as a rich archive for the astronomy community, containing spectra of over a billion galaxies, hundreds of millions of high-quality stellar and galactic spectra, and over a million ice absorption spectra. The archive will enable a wide range of investigations that will inform and expand many aspects of astronomical and cosmological knowledge and understanding.
Selected Reading & Media References
A list of pertinent publications is available at https://spherex.caltech.edu/
About the Speaker
James (Jamie) Bock is an experimental cosmologist and the Principal Investigator of the SPHEREx mission (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer).
His research focuses on pioneering new technologies and instruments designed for fundamental measurements of the state of the universe.
Prior to SPHEREx, Jamie developed an instrument architecture with wide-field telescopes and superconducting bolometer arrays to search for a telltale polarization signal in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) associated with a background of gravitational waves from cosmic inflation. It is central to the BICEP-Keck experiment based at the South Pole observations from which have led to constraints on inflation. He also led the development of an earlier generation of focal plane detectors for the Planck and Herschel satellites. These devices arose from detectors he pioneered as a graduate student for the BOOMERANG CMB project that provided initial evidence that the universe has a flat geometry. Finally, he developed a novel sounding rocket project to study the near-infrared extragalactic background light with small, specialized imaging and spectroscopic telescopes. Many of these methods were later incorporated into the design of SPHEREx.
Jamie is an author on over 800 scientific papers, mainly focused on technology, astronomy, and cosmology.
Among other honors and awards, he received the Gruber Cosmology Prize as a member of the Planck team, the AAS Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation, and the SPIE Goddard Award.
Jamie earned a BS in Physics and Mathematics at Duke and a PhD in Physics at UC Berkeley.
Social Media
https://pma.caltech.edu/people/james-j-jamie-bock
https://cosmology.caltech.edu/
https://spherex.caltech.edu/