NASA's upcoming SPHEREx mission will have some similarities with the James Webb Space Telescope. But the two observatories will take dramatically different approaches to studying the sky.

The SPHEREx mission will be able to scan the entire sky every six months and create a map of the cosmos unlike any before. Scheduled to launch no later than April 2025, it will probe what happened within the first second after the Big Bang, how galaxies form and evolve, and the prevalence of molecules critical to the formation of life, like water, locked away as ice in our galaxy.

As human activity extends outward into the solar system, we'll need a way to keep track of space junk, and the growing number of missions around the moon and beyond.

Recently, the newly-formed U.S. Space Force announced plans to create CHPS, the Cis-lunar Highway Patrol System. Despite an acronym harking back to a certain cheesy TV series in the 1970s, CHPS will provide a serious look at space traffic further out in orbit around the Earth-moon system. Such a network is vital, as private companies and space agencies are set to return to the moon in a big way in the coming decade.

"The CHPS program will deliver space domain awareness, in a region that is one thousand times greater than our current area of responsibility," says CHPS program manager Michael Lopez in a recent press release. "AFRL is interested in hearing from companies that may have ideas that differ from ours, and could contribute to the satellite's capabilities."

The problem was highlighted recently with the impact of a rocket booster on the moon on March 4.