“NASA’s newest space telescope, SPHEREx — designed to seek out the key ingredients for life in the Milky Way — and a sun-focused mission called PUNCH are on their way to space.

Both missions lifted off together aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 11:10 p.m. ET (8:10 p.m PT) Tuesday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California…

 SPHEREx, or the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, aims to shed light on how the universe has evolved and find where life’s key ingredients originated in the cosmos.

PUNCH, or Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, will study how the sun affects the solar system. The mission will observe the sun’s hot outer atmosphere, called the corona, and study solar wind, or the energized particles that emerge in a steady stream from the sun.”

From CNN.