2026 Sylvia A. Earle Award for Exploration Excellence by the Explorers Club
Award: 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.
Awarded 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.
NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope, which launched in March, is mapping the universe like none before it, providing a big-picture view that will illuminate the origins of our universe, galaxies within it, and life’s key ingredients in our own galaxy. The mission will observe hundreds of millions of galaxies and other objects, mapping the cosmos in more than 102 wavelengths of light that are invisible to the human eye. This enables SPHEREx to detect evidence of chemical compounds and molecules, each of which has a unique signature in the colors it absorbs and emits. This can also help scientists measure how far away objects are, making SPHEREx ideal for studying distant galaxies and mapping their locations in 3D. 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, with its entire dataset available to the public.
Date: Jan. 15, 2026
