Phil Korngut and SPHEREx Featured in Nature
Phil Korngut. Credit: Rocco Ceselin for Nature
By Andrew Moseman
NASA’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) is an all-sky survey that will study hundreds of millions of galaxies to answer questions about the origins of everything. Right now, the instrument is coming together at Caltech.
Scientific researcher Phil Korngut is one of those working to calibrate SPHEREx, a mission led by Caltech physics professor Jamie Bock that is being developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA. His laboratory on campus, which was designed to do this work, was recently featured in Nature magazine’s “Where I Work” section.
In the piece, Korngut describes his team’s efforts to study the early universe through near-infrared spectroscopy:
To do these analyses, we’ve built a large cryogenic optical testing facility to simulate the conditions that the spacecraft will be working in. The lab has a gold-coated, sapphire window, which you can see behind me in this photograph. Unlike glass, sapphire is clear in the infrared range, and this helps us to control how much light goes in and out of the room.