'We essentially have 102 new maps of the entire sky.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. NASA aimed big for its SPHEREx's first 3D cosmic map . Only six months after starting operations, the orbital space telescope has completed its inaugural infrared scan of the entire sky. Although infrared isn't visible to the human eye, the map's 102 wavelengths remain detectable across the universe--to the right instruments. "It's incredible how much information SPHEREx has collected in just six months--information that will be especially valuable when used alongside our other missions' data to better understand our universe," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA, said in a statement .

In the film "2001: A Space Odyssey," an astronaut travels through a seeming tunnel of light. Earlier this summer, Artechouse, an organization producing immersive, technology-based art, started offering a science-backed version of a similar trip at its New York venue. The show, titled "Beyond the Light," is a looping twenty-six-minute journey through space and other realms inspired by images from the James Webb Space Telescope (J.W.S.T.). Artechouse began talks with NASA about a show in 2018, and started pulling this one together earlier this year, after the first images captured by J.W.S.T. were released to the public last July. More than sixteen thousand years ago, cave explorers in what's now Lascaux, France, painted animals that are believed to represent the constellations.

Are you watching the new season of the Apple TV series Foundation and thinking, "Wow, space looks cool. I wish it really was like that"? You're in luck--it very well could be. Foundation showrunner David S. Goyer says his adaptation of Isaac Asimov's science fiction series honed its cosmic details with Kevin Hand, a scientist who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and who's currently hard at work figuring out the logistics of landing a rover on Europa, one of Jupiter's 95 known moons. The show also found inspiration for its spacey visuals in recent images sent down from the James Webb Space Telescope, which Goyer calls "a treasure trove of material."

After a year in which war ravaged Ukraine, stubbornly high inflation brought the global economy to the brink of recession, a "tripledemic" revived pandemic fears, and limited progress was made on the climate crisis, it would be understandable to approach 2023 with a sense of unease. And yet a series of scientific breakthroughs in 2022 are bringing reasons for optimism for the new year. From fusion energy to improved vaccines and organ transplants, an artificial intelligence revolution to diverted asteroids, technologies previously found only in science fiction came to fruition. Those landmark discoveries, some the culmination of decades of work, offer grounds for hope. Why do heatwaves in the UK feel hotter than abroad?

The James Webb telescope will be the world biggest and most powerful telescope when it launches in 2018. Nasa describes it as a'time machine' that can peer back 200 million years after the Big Bang. This week, Nasa engineers in Maryland got a little closer to launch with the completion of testing on its science cameras and the installation of the final flight mirrors. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope completed primary mirror sits in the cleanroom at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and supported over it on the tripod is the secondary mirror After over a year of planning, nearly four months of final cold testing and monitoring, the testing on the science instruments module of the observatory was completed. They were removed from a giant thermal vacuum chamber at Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland called the Space Environment Simulator.