NASA and SpaceX on Friday will count down to a long-awaited crewed rocket launch that will allow them to bring home U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been stuck on the International Space Station for nine months.

The $488 million Spherex mission aims to explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments.

NASA’s newest space telescope rocketed into orbit Tuesday to map the entire sky like never before — a sweeping look at hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow since the beginning of time.

A semi-frontal view of the SPHEREx observatory is seen during integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, U.S., in this handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 24, 2025. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY (Reuters) - A NASA telescope was launched into space from California on Tuesday for a mission to explore the origins of the universe and to scour the Milky Way galaxy for hidden reservoirs of water,

NASA astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams are closer to getting home, nine months after arriving on Boeing’s Starliner. A capsule is set to arrive at the space station Thursday.

NASA’s newest space telescope, called SPHEREx, finally got off the ground this week, after a series of delays that had stalled its launch since late February. From low-Earth orbit, it will gather data on millions of stars and galaxies—and search for the ingredients of life.

SPHEREx begins its mission to scan hundreds of millions of galaxies, while companion satellites track solar winds.