NASA's new SPHEREx space telescope takes its 1st cosmic images: 'The instrument team nailed it'

Six panels. The top three are purple, blue and greenish. The bottom three are yellow-green, yellow and orange.

You know how the James Webb Space Telescope is said to be revolutionizing astronomy because it can study wavelengths hidden to human eyes? Well, those wavelengths lie in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum — and on April 1, NASA announced its brand new infrared space telescope, SPHEREx, has officially opened its eyes to the cosmos as well.

This first light, as it's called, shows that all of the spacecraft's systems are working just as expected. "Based on the images we are seeing, we can now say that the instrument team nailed it," Jamie Bock, SPHEREx’s principal investigator at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement.