Kavli Affiliate: James Bock
| First 5 Authors: Sean Bryan, Sean Bryan, , ,
| Summary:
SPHEREx is a NASA infrared astronomy mission that launched on March 12th,
2025 and is operating successfully in low-Earth orbit (LEO). The mission is
currently observing the entire sky in 102 spectral channels in four independent
all-sky surveys and also achieves enhanced coverage in two deep fields. This
data will resolve key science questions about the early universe, galaxy
formation, and the origin of water and biogenic molecules. In this paper, we
describe the survey planning software (SPS) that enables SPHEREx to observe
efficiently while mitigating a range of operational challenges in LEO. Our
optimal target selection algorithm achieves the required high coverage in both
the All-Sky and Deep Surveys. The algorithm plans observations to stay within
our time-varying allowable pointing zone, interleaves required data downlink
passes, and mitigates outages due to the South Atlantic Anomaly and other
events. As demonstrated by the sky coverage achieved in the first SPHEREx
public data release, our approach is performing well in flight. The SPHEREx SPS
is a key new capability that enables the mission to deliver groundbreaking
science from LEO.
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”James Bock”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=3