We asked our staff to choose their favorite Space.com stories of 2025. Here's what we got.
The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), which launched back in May, was designed to explore the cosmos in optical and near-infrared light. Over its planned two-year mission, this observatory will observe the entire sky using a triple-mirror telescope and mercury-cadmium-telluride photodetector arrays, allowing it to gather data on more than 450 million galaxies, including the 100 million stars in the Milky Way, to explore the origins of the Universe.

