SPHEREx mission team wins 2026 Sylvia A. Earle Award for Exploration Excellence

On Jan. 15, 2026, the Explorers Club awarded the 2026 Sylvia A. Earle Award for Exploration Excellence to the SPHEREx mission team, including Jamie Bock, SPHEREx principal investigator at Caltech; Olivier Doré, SPHEREx project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and John Wisniewski, SPHEREx program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

The Sylvia A. Earle Award for Exploration Excellence, previously known as the Citation of Merit, is an annual award given by the Explorers Club to an individual or team in recognition of outstanding feats of exploration or contributions to the welfare and objectives of the Explorers Club.

NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope, launched in March, is mapping the universe in more than 102 wavelengths of light and will observe hundreds of millions of galaxies and other objects. By detecting chemical compounds and molecules through their unique spectral signatures, SPHEREx can help scientists measure distances and map the locations of galaxies in three dimensions.

The observatory began surveying the sky in May and completed its first all-sky mosaic in December. It will complete three additional all-sky scans during its two-year primary mission, and its entire dataset will be available to the public.

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Science, Spherex, Jamie Bock, Olivier Doré, John Wisniewski, Sylvia A. Earle