Q&A with Jamie Bock, principal investigator of NASA’s SPHEREx mission (members only)

SpaceX’s launch team loaded super-chilled liquid propellants into a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday and fired the booster’s nine first stage engines at Cape Canaveral, marching toward liftoff Monday with a NASA observatory built to find planets around other stars in our galactic neighborhood.

Cameras in various locations at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center capture the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA’s TESS planet-hunting telescope.

After a search for an outside funding source turned up empty, NASA plans to end observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope in January to conclude a 16-year mission that discovered exoplanets, studied galaxies in the ancient universe, and peered at planets and asteroids in our own solar system.