The Current - NASA’s new telescope to make a 3D map of the universe

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

NASA’s new SPHEREx telescope launched earlier this month is set to collect data on more than 450 million galaxies, and some 100 million stars in the Milky Way in an effort to build a 3D map of the universe. That’s a lot of information — and the Canadian who acted as the lead flight systems engineer for the telescope’s launch discusses what they hope to learn from all that data.

Here's a question for you. What's your email address saying about your Canadian business? First impressions matter, and your email says a lot. It's your customer's first look at your brand. A custom.ca email shows you're credible, professional, and proudly Canadian. It signals you do business in Canada. For Canadians, show you mean business from the get-go. Get your custom.ca email now at yourcustomemail.ca

and let your email do the talking. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Falcon 9 is in startup. L.E. is go for launch. Range is go and weather is go. is go for launch. Range is go and weather is go. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, mission. And with that the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched earlier this month. It was carrying NASA's newest observatory telescope into orbit. It's called

SPHEREX and if all goes well the telescope will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies and more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way. The goal is ambitious and I quote here, to map the universe like none before it, providing a big picture view that will illuminate the origins of our universe and galaxies within it and life's key ingredients in our own galaxy. Wow. Farah Alabe was the lead flight systems engineer for Sphearix at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She's from Joliet, Quebec, just north of Montreal and we've reached Farah Alabaie in California. Good morning. Good morning. I love to hear that countdown, and I think for all of us when

you see something, you know, you hear that countdown, there's just a sense of anticipation. But for you, what did you have writing, you know, in those seconds before it took off? Oh gosh, I mean I I've been working on Spherax, one of the spacecraft that was on that rocket for a little over three years now. So I saw Spherax being developed from really a paper concept on a bunch of PowerPoint slides and the sort of desperate pieces that we had put together through to becoming a spacecraft, an observatory, being tested. Much of the testing and building was done

out in Boulder, Colorado. We then shipped to California in early January and finally got ready to launch in early March. We had several delays due to issues and then also due to weather. So it was quite the moment to finally get there and be like, oh wow, we're finally going to space. Space is the safest space for those spacecraft.

Well, I saw you doing this sort of like the play-by-play commentary, a video of that. And I wasn't sure, was it joy or relief when you saw that thing taken off? I think it's a little bit of both, right? Because I mean, you're putting this spacecraft that you've worked on for years on top of a rocket that is mostly controlled bomb essentially to get you up to space.

It's certainly always a nervous moment of is it going to work or are we going to be able to go? Are we finally starting this mission there? I think it's definitely a little bit of both. I read that the launch timing was so precise, 8, 10, 12 seconds PM Pacific time. Can you explain the very, very tiny window that you had in which you could launch? Yeah. Spherix is in an Earth orbit. Um, so it's, it's not going very far. I mean, it's,

it's just going to stay there and that's where it images the, um, the universe from. Um, but we want to be in a very precise orbit. It's called a sun synchronous orbit. If you can imagine the, the earth rotating, there's a line where it's daytime. And on the other side it's nighttime, right? It's sort of how it works and for us on the ground, you see it as day or night, but if you were orbiting around the Earth, you'll see literally part of the Earth being shaded and part of the Earth being in the Sun. Well, we ride that

line, it's called the Terminator. So on the Sun's synchronous orbit on one side of the spacecraft, it's always nighttime and on one side of the spacecraft, it's always daytime. And that helps us because we can point our solar arrays at the Sun and get energy, but on the other side, which is night, that's the side we care about, right? We want to be able to image the night sky, the stars. So it gives us the maximum amount of time that we can observe the universe if we can always be staring deep into space. Well, in order to target that orbit, you can only launch at a particular time every day. And that specifically happened to be between between 7.09.57 and 7.10.27. And particularly we want it to be in that 30 second window.

If you hit right in the middle, then you're exactly where you want to be in the orbit and that sort of maximizes the science. That's unbelievable what goes in. I mean, and that's just the beginning of what goes in. Or that's not the beginning, that's the end. That's the middle. I don't even know where it is

because you spend all these time just building it and then launching it and then the work that comes ahead. And I love it. It's like a great trivia question we can have now. What is the size of a subcompact car, the weight of a baby grand piano, and trying to get at the origins of the universe? The answer, of course, is Spheerex. And explain that to us, this idea of mapping the universe and getting the origins of the universe. How will this telescope accomplish that?

Yeah, so Spherax is what we call a survey telescope. So we're not doing sort of very precise images of a particular star, we're not looking for exoplanets, maybe like other telescopes do. The goal of Spherax is really that quantity, right? So it's trying to take, as you mentioned at the start, images of about half a billion galaxies. And it does that by constantly mapping the night sky. And so it's going to take four full maps of our sky, of our universe, over the span of two years. And what that gets you is different types of information, but what that gets you is it's a 3D map of the universe.

And we get it in three dimension because in addition to the images, each image, if you can imagine, is taken in 102 different colors of infrared. And so the way that people like to explain it is if you've ever worn rainbow glasses or used a filter, right? You can imagine taking the same image, but we have these filters on our detectors that allow us to detect that same image in those different colors. And that helps us give us information about distance. So for every image, you not only have the galaxies you're looking at but also how far they are

and that's going to help us build that first 3D map of the universe. And from that information we can get all sorts of science. And one thing that's really cool, you know, I'm an engineer so I learned the science from the scientists on the team so I get just as excited as everyone else about what we're doing. But one thing that's really neat is that the universe actually has a structure, and I personally didn't know that. I just thought, well, everything's kind of spread a certain way and it's kind of random, but not quite. The universe has a structure and it's a structure that's existed since immediately after the

Big Bang. And we can still see that structure today. It's expanded, but it's that same structure. So by understanding the shape of the universe now, we can essentially hit rewind and understand what happened basically in and then it's crazy how small that is in the first, I think it's trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. And there's sort of a rapid expansion of the universe that happened right in that moment. And that's one of the questions that Sverix is trying to answer is sort of what physics

guided that moment that we call inflation. shows you're credible, professional and proudly Canadian. It signals you do business in Canada. For Canadians, show you mean business from the get-go. Get your custom.ca email now at yourcustomemail.ca and let your email do the talking. You're an entrepreneur. Growth is essential for your business. At BDC, we get that. And we're here to help you stay two steps ahead.

With our flexible financing and advisory services, we help you adapt, growing your business in the face of today's challenges and tomorrow's opportunities. Stepping up for entrepreneurs, we're on it. BDC. Financing. Advising. Know-how. Financing. Advising. Know-how. Part of it, the mission that really intrigued me, is this idea that you want to chart where frozen water and other essential ingredients of life exist across the Milky Way.

Now, tell me why. Like, why is this a crucial part of the mission? So, of course, you know, water, we know on Earth, is an essential ingredients for life here, but we don't necessarily know where it comes from. And so what Spherex is doing is by taking these images, it's looking for intergalactic ice. And where that ice is formed is actually often, we'll find it in dust. One of the questions is, okay, well, where does the water go? Where

is it when early galaxies form? Where does it go? Where does it come from? And how does it end up in a planet like ours? So through these observations, that's another question that we'll be able to answer as well. And when will you start seeing the images that Spherx will be capturing? So very soon actually. So now that we have launched, we're going through this period called commissioning, where we have to sort of make sure every part of the spacecraft works, get all the systems up and running. That is going to go on until, you know, for about another month.

As part of that commissioning, we will take the first images, the sort of trial images to see how things are looking and get everything kind of tuned up. Then we'll start the surveys. So it's really exciting. I'm used to working on missions that have to go really far away before they can start doing science. And this is almost immediate. I read an Instagram post where you said you'd spent 18 months in Colorado where the telescope

was being built. And you wrote about battling burnout. Can you tell me about that and what you were going through? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you can hear it in my voice, right, that I love the job that I do. Absolutely. And it's something that's, it's a passion of mine and so my work rarely feels like work, even though it is. But this job is demanding when you're

dealing with literally rocket science and difficult things that you have to go through to get these spacecraft working. It's demanding to have to travel to partners and get this work done and often it's long hours. And I'm always someone that dives in and get things done, but it does eventually take a toll on your body and it takes a toll on your life of being gone and doing these things. And it is absolutely worth it. But I think one of the things that I'm discovering as I'm maturing is that sometimes there are

things that are just as important in life or more important and that your body doesn't always keep up with you no matter how much you want to do. You know, this concept of self-care and taking time and taking the time off when you do have it. I've learned to sort of disconnect from my work a little bit when I get home. Now I put my work phone in a different room unless I'm absolutely needed.

I think it's important to share that part of it, right, the human side of it, because I think you often see people that do these big things and just assume they're made of some different material than you are, and that they can just get these things done and they just have more stamina than you. But the reality is that we're all human and these things do catch up to you, and I think it's important for me to share that because taking care of my physical health and my mental health is something that has become very important for me, and that's what allows me to share that because taking care of my physical health and my mental health is something that has become very important for me and that's what allows me to perform.

When I do set these boundaries and take time off and go on vacation and leave my phone behind, that part of it actually allows me to come back and be even better at the work that I do. Yeah, I find it really refreshing to hear that too. I saw you or a video of you getting your honorary doctorate from Concordia University in Montreal, it was back in 2023. And as you were speaking to the students, I was really struck by your honesty. And you know, you said that you've got a career that had been marked by discrimination and performance anxiety. And I thought that

was an interesting message to be to transmit to transmit to to the graduates who were there And why is it that you you want to open people up to be ambitious and to be courageous? But to be realistic at the same time I think it's because I wish I wish I had known That I wasn't the only one going through these difficult times when I started my career, right? Like I wish I had known that I wasn't alone living through microaggressions or that I wasn't alone feeling like I wasn't good enough and that I, and that I, you know, that imposter syndrome that we all actually, most of us have gone through at some point in our career. And when you

start off your career or even when you're in the middle of your career, you just assume that you are the only one living through that. And I think in these sort of modern times with Instagram and YouTube and LinkedIn, you only really see the successes, right? You don't see the difficult times of, oh, wow, you know, I needed to take a few weeks off because I was tired or, oh, this one didn't quite work out. And, and I think it makes that performance anxiety even worse because you compare yourself to something that's not real. And so when I started discovering that the models that I was looking at were, or,

you know, this impression that I had of people around me was, was not real at all. And that we all go through our own struggles. I was like, well, why, why has no one told me this? We're all in the same boat here. Let's talk about it. And so for me now that I'm here, I think it's really important for me to just be honest and be, you know, people often ask me what type of leader I am when I have people on my team. And I describe myself as sort of this empathetic and open leader who's sort of, I always share kind of how I'm feeling and how, let's say as a leader, like, oh, I'm growing in this area, like I'll work with people on my team to be like, help me, right? Like, let's help each other get through this and I think it's something that people, I've

learned, really appreciate. And when I started doing it, it's not always easy, right? Because it is a very vulnerable thing to do. But as I started doing it, people around me were like, oh, that really helped me. That was refreshing. That's something that made me have the chance to be like, no, I'm going to take some time off or whatever it is, I'm going to take care of myself.

And so when I saw the influence that it had, I sort of continued to see the importance of myself. And so when I saw the influence that it had, I sort of continued to see the importance of it. And so that sort of, it's a self perpetuating thing, right? Where, where it sort of reinforced the importance of that honesty. Absolutely. I love it. And that kind of courage too, that personal courage I really find is contagious and people around you feel it. And now that the Spherix has launched, what's your role in the mission? Do you track its work closely,

as you have been obviously for the past three years, or is it like a child that you raise and just launch out into the world and just watch to see what will happen next? It's a little bit like sending your child off to university and that like you are still sort of around if there's any problems, but someone else is taking care

of them. So in this case, we have an operations team on our team, and they're really the ones that are taking care of the spacecraft, getting it up and running, and are going to do the long-term operations. I'm still around for the next month or so through that commissioning period, exactly for that reason. If there's issues, if they need help, if they need context. So wrapping up a lot of the paperwork that we have to, that we've had to do to get this mission up and running. And then after that I'm

currently sort of trying to figure out what that next step will be. We tend to, so I work at the Jet Propulsion Lab which is one of the NASA centers and we move from project to project as engineers. So I should be figuring that out in the next month or so. Well, enjoy this one before you have to move on to the next one because it's quite an accomplishment in and of itself. Farah, just keep reaching for those stars. You're making us proud here in Canada. Thank you so much.

Farah Elabeh is the lead flight system engineer for Spherex at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.