Management

The SPHEREx mission is sponsored by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, where Nicola Fox is the associate administrator and Eric Smith is the acting director of the Astrophysics Division. Mark Sistilli is the SPHEREx program executive and John Wisniewski is the program scientist.

SPHEREx is a Medium Explorer Mission. The Explorers program is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for the mission’s overall management and operations. At JPL, James Fanson is the SPHEREx project manager, Beth Fabinsky is the deputy project manager, and Olivier Doré is the project scientist. The mission principal investigator, Jamie Bock, is based at Caltech with a joint appointment at JPL.

BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) in Boulder, Colorado, built the telescope and the spacecraft bus and is responsible for integration and testing.

The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan: Caltech, the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Arizona State University, the University of California Irvine, the University of Arizona, the Rochester Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, the Ohio State University, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, KASI (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute) and Seoul National University, and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics (ASIAA) in Taiwan.

KASI built and delivered a specialized test chamber for the SPHEREx detectors and optics.

Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech.

NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP), based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for management of the launch service. Denton Gibson is the LSP launch director/manager. Serkan Bastug is the LSP mission manager. Maxx Taga is the launch site integration manager for SPHEREx.