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3 Min Read

NASA’s SPHEREx Mission Maps Water Ice Throughout Cygnus X

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An observation made by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) shows the chemical signatures of water ice (shown in bright blue) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (orange) in Cygnus X, one of the most active and turbulent regions of star birth in our Milky Way galaxy.

One of several maps of molecular clouds made by SPHEREx, this observation is detailed in a study published April 15, 2026, in The Astrophysical Journal. The study supports the hypothesis that interstellar ice forms on the surface of tiny dust particles no larger than particles found in the smoke from a candle. The findings show the densest regions of ice coincide with the densest regions of dust, and the dust shields the ice from the intense ultraviolet radiation emitted by newborn stars.

Figure A shows the same region, but in three different wavelengths assigned the colors green, blue, and red. This SPHEREx observation highlights the dark, dusty lanes that protect the water molecules from the intense radiation generated by newborn stars.

Although space telescopes such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the agency’s retired Spitzer have detected water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other icy molecules throughout our galaxy, the SPHEREx observatory is the first infrared mission specifically designed to find such molecules over the entire sky, via the mission’s large-scale spectral survey.

Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the SPHEREx observatory launchedMarch 11, 2025, and has the unique ability to see the sky in 102 colors, each representing a different wavelength of infrared light that offers distinctive information about galaxies, stars, planet-forming regions, and other cosmic features. By late 2025, SPHEREx had completed the first of four all-sky infrared maps of the universe, charting the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to help answer major questions about the cosmos, including those about the origins of water and life. 

The mission is managed by JPL for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The telescope and the spacecraft bus were built by BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data is being conducted by a team of scientists at 13 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea and Taiwan, led by Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment, and by JPL Project Scientist Olivier Doré. Data is processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena, which manages JPL for NASA. The SPHEREx dataset is freely available to scientists and the public.

For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/

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Image Details

These observations made by NASA’s SPHEREx mission reveal vast frozen complexes in the Cygnus X star-forming region of the Milky Way galaxy. Water ice, shown as bright blue structures at left, exactly overlays the dark lanes of interstellar dust, shown in different wavelengths at right.

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) mission has mapped interstellar ice at an unprecedented scale. Covering regions in our Milky Way galaxy more than 600 light-years across, the ice was found inside giant molecular clouds — vast regions of gas and dust where dense clumps of matter collapse under gravity, giving birth to stars. A study describing these findings published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal.

One of SPHEREx’s main goals is to map the chemical signatures of various types of interstellar ice. This ice includes molecules like water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, which are vital to the chemistry that allows life to develop. Researchers believe these ice reservoirs, attached to the surfaces of tiny dust grains, are where most of the universe’s water is formed and stored. The water in Earth’s oceans — and the ices in comets and on other planets and moons in our galaxy — originates from these regions.

“These vast frozen complexes are like ‘interstellar glaciers’ that could deliver a massive water supply to new solar systems that will be born in the region,” said study coauthor Phil Korngut, the instrument scientist for SPHEREx at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “It’s a profound idea that we are looking at a map of material that could rain on nascent planets and potentially support future life.” 

Thanks to its spectral capabilities, SPHEREx can measure the amounts of various ices and molecules, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in and around molecular clouds, helping scientists better understand their composition and environment.  

Although space telescopes such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the agency’s retired Spitzer have detected water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other icy molecules throughout our galaxy, the SPHEREx observatory is the first infrared mission specifically designed to find such molecules over the entire sky via the mission’s large-scale spectral survey. 

“We expected to detect these ices in front of individual bright stars: The light from a star acts like a spotlight, revealing any ice in the space between us and that star. But this is something different,” said lead author Joseph Hora, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “When looking along the galactic plane — where most of the stars, gas, and dust of our galaxy are concentrated — there’s a lot of diffuse background light shining through entire dust clouds, and SPHEREx can see the spatial distribution of the ices they contain in incredible detail.” 

Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the SPHEREx observatory launched March 11, 2025, and has the unique ability to see the sky in 102 colors, each representing a different wavelength of infrared light that offers distinctive information about galaxies, stars, planet-forming regions, and other cosmic features. By late 2025, SPHEREx had completed the first of four all-sky infrared maps of the universe, charting the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to help answer major questions about the cosmos, including those about the origins of water and life.

Icy origins

Using the SPHEREx maps of various icy molecules, the study’s authors were able to look deep into many molecular clouds in the Cygnus X and North American Nebula regions of the Milky Way. In the densest areas, where the amount of dust is greatest, dark filamentary lanes block the visible light from the stars behind. With its infrared eye, the space telescope also revealed where the different ices — which absorb specific wavelengths of infrared light that would pass through the clouds if they consisted only of dust — are at their densest.  

This finding supports the hypothesis that interstellar ice forms on the surface of tiny dust particles, which are no larger than particles found in candle smoke, and that the dense regions of dust shield the ices from the intense ultraviolet radiation emitted by newborn stars. However, not all ices are treated the same way in the interstellar medium.

“We can investigate the environmental factors that contribute to different ice formation rates across large areas of interstellar space,” said study coauthor Gary Melnick, also an astronomer at the CfA. “The SPHEREx mission’s ‘big picture’ view provides valuable new information you can’t get when zooming in on a small region.” 

Within this broad perspective, adds Melnick, SPHEREx can do something ground-based observatories cannot: detect varying amounts of water and carbon dioxide, two ices that respond differently to environmental factors. For example, the presence of intense ultraviolet light from nearby massive young stars or the heating of these dust grains by that light affects the abundances of different ices in distinct ways. 

This is just the beginning for the mission. Observations from SPHEREx will provide scientists with a powerful tool to explore the various components of our galaxy, the physics of the interstellar medium that lead to star and planet formation, and the chemical processes that deliver molecules essential for life to newly formed planets.

More about SPHEREx

The mission is managed by JPL for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The telescope and the spacecraft bus were built by BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data is being conducted by a team of scientists at 13 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea and Taiwan, led by Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment, and by JPL Project Scientist Olivier Doré. Data is processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena, which manages JPL for NASA. The SPHEREx dataset is freely available to scientists and the public. 

For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/

Media Contacts 

Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov 

Alise Fisher
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-617-4977
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov 

Amy C. Oliver, FRAS
Public Affairs Officer
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
amy.oliver@cfa.harvard.edu

2026-022

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In the more than five decades of the Landsat program, there have been many visionaries who have changed the course of remote sensing history. One such figure is Alexander Goetz, a physicist and planetary scientist who pioneered imaging spectrometry from space.

Goetz was part of the Landsat Program from the very beginning, working as a principal investigator for Landsats 1 and 2. Years later, he returned to the program as a member of the first formal Landsat Science Team on Landsat 7. This diverse group of researchers, technologists, and calibration and applications specialists helped advance Landsat science goals, refined algorithms, and supported on-the-ground calibration. Crucially, the team advised on the creation of the long-term acquisition plan (LTAP), which ensured consistent global, seasonal coverage of Landsat data. Goetz, for his part, led a study titled “Land and Land-Use Change in the Climate Sensitive High Plains: An Automated Approach with Landsat”. 

Goetz, who passed away in 2025 at age 86, was an innovator in the field of spectrometry. According to a 2009 special issue of Remote Sensing of Environment, Goetz was “one of the few remote sensing scientists in the early days of the Landsat program to recognize the Multispectral Scanner (MSS) and later the Thematic Mapper (TM) for what they really were: quantitative spectral measuring instruments, not just ‘cameras in space’ that made pretty pictures.” 

True to that vision, in 1974—just two years after the launch of Landsat 1—Goetz developed a portable field spectrometer to acquire ground truth surface reflectance data to calibrate data from the MSS. Building on the success of the field spectrometer experiment, he worked with a team to develop the Shuttle Multispectral Infrared Radiometer (SMIRR), which flew on the Space Shuttle in 1981. SMIRR, which collected data across ten bands, enabled scientists to map mineral composition from space for the first time. Data from SMIRR contributed to the case for adding band 7 to the TM on Landsat 4. By measuring data in the shortwave-infrared (SWIR) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, band 7 allowed geological researchers to better map rock types. Goetz was awarded the prestigious William T. Pecora Award and the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for his pioneering work on imaging spectrometry. 

Today, 27 years after the launch of Landsat 7, we honor the legacy of Alexander Goetz, one of the key figures in Landsat history.

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