We present the combined 2.5–30 μm spectra of four protostars acquired with the infrared camera and the infrared spectrograph on board the AKARI and Spitzer space telescopes, respectively. To analyze the ice absorption features in the 8–22 μm, we first performed a continuum determination process on mid-infrared spectra and applied a method to subtract the silicate absorption. We conducted a global fitting process to the absorption features in the combined infrared spectra using the experimental ice absorbance data to identify the intrinsic absorption of each ice component. We first derived the H2O ice column densities of both stretch and libration modes at 3.05 μm and 13.6 μm simultaneously. We also identified the absorption features containing NH3, CH3OH, CO2, and CO and decomposed their mixed components and compared their ice abundances at different evolutionary stages of the protostars. We explored possible absorptions of the organic ice species such as HCOOH, CH3CHO, and CH3CH2OH in the mid-infrared ranges. The ice analysis method developed in this study can be applied to the ice spectra obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) will provide all-sky spectral survey data covering optical to mid-infrared wavelengths with a spatial resolution of 6.′′2, which can be widely used to study galaxy formation and evolution. We investigate the galaxy-galaxy blending in SPHEREx datasets using the mock galaxy catalogs generated from cosmological simulations and observational data. Only ∼0.7% of the galaxies will be blended with other galaxies in all-sky survey data with a limiting magnitude of 19 AB mag. However, the fraction of blended galaxies dramatically increases to ∼7–9% in the deep survey area around the ecliptic poles, where the depth reaches ∼22 AB mag. We examine the impact of the blending in the number count and luminosity function analyses using the SPHEREx data. We find that the number count can be overestimated by up to 10–20% in the deep regions due to the flux boosting, suggesting that the impact of galaxy-galaxy blending on the number count is moderate. However, galaxy-galaxy blending can marginally change the luminosity function by up to 50% over a wide range of redshifts. As we only employ the magnitude limit at Ks-band for the source detection, the blending fractions determined in this study should be regarded as lower limits.

Reverberation mapping (RM) is an ecient method to investigate the physical sizes of the broad line region (BLR) and dusty torus in an active galactic nucleus (AGN). The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission will provide multi-epoch spectroscopic data at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. These data can be used for RM experiments with bright AGNs. We present results of a feasibility test using SPHEREx data in the SPHEREx deep regions for torus RM measurements. We investigate the physical properties of bright AGNs in the SPHEREx deep eld. Based on this information, we compute the eciency of detecting torus time lags in simulated light curves. We demonstrate that, in combination with complementary optical data with a depth of  20 mag in B􀀀band, lags of  750 days for tori can be measured for more than  200 bright AGNs. If high signal-to-noise ratio photometric data with a depth of  21{22 mag are available, RM measurements are possible for up to  900 objects. When complemented by well-designed early optical observations, SPHEREx can provide a unique dataset for studies of the physical properties of dusty tori in bright AGNs.