Exploring infrared aurora in the high-altitude thermosphere with NASA’s SPHEREx mission

NASA’s SPHEREx (https://spherex.caltech.edu/) is an astrophysics mission in LEO that continuously observes the full-sky from 0.75um-5um with spectral imaging, providing unique outward-looking line-of-sight (LOS) measurements of multiple airglow emission lines above 680 km within these wavelengths, which have consistently been observed since the start of the mission in May 2025. There are large observational gaps of aurora emissions above 600 km, which SPHEREx could augment by looking upwards into the sky and, not being affected by lower atmospheric emissions, capturing rare and difficult to observe soft energy particle precipitation events. These airglow measurements fill in a gap in high altitude infrared auroral observations, offering new insight into coupling between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere-thermosphere and potentially improving modeling of the thermosphere transition region. We will present the first results on utilizing unique SPHEREx observations and GNSS measurements to analyze auroral emissions at near-IR and the high-latitude ionospheric electrodynamics during the January 2026 geomagnetic storm.