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  • WHERE I WORK

Building precision instruments to explore the cosmos

Phil Korngut tests NASA’s SPHEREx telescope under extreme conditions at his laboratory in California.
  1. Rachael Pells

    1. Rachael Pells is a science and technology journalist in London.

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Phil Korngut in his lab at Caltech working on NASA's SPHEREx mission, assembling and testing the flight hardware.

Phil Korngut is an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Credit: Rocco Ceselin for Nature

“As the instrument scientist for NASA’s SPHEREx mission, which aims to measure the near-infrared spectra of around 450 million galaxies, my work involves determining what we need to build to capture data from space, using a combination of engineering, cosmology and astrophysics skills. Here in my laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, we’re calibrating a telescope that will survey hundreds of millions of galaxies. We need a snappy name: SPHEREx stands for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer.

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Nature 626, 920 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00484-z

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