NASA will launch the SphereX telescope into space in 2024 to look for clues about the Big Bang

It’s one of the most fundamental questions in science: exactly how did our universe begin?

Now, NASA has revealed ambitious plans to launch a new telescope into space to help shed light on this mystery.

The space telescope will be launched sometime between June 2024 and April 2025 and will look for clues about the Big Bang, as well as signs of life beyond our planet.

NASA has approved preliminary design plans for the space telescope, called the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), which is about the same size as a subcompact car.

It is equipped with instruments to detect infrared light invisible to the human eye. These data can reveal what objects they are made of, as well as their distance from Earth

During its two-year mission, SphereX will map the entire sky four times, creating a huge database of stars, galaxies, nebulae, and other celestial objects.

The space telescope will be the first for NASA to build its own full-infrared spectroscopy map and will observe a total of 102 infrared-specific colors.

Allen Farrington, the SphereX project manager at NASA ‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said, “This is like moving from black and white to color images;

The SphereX mission has three main objectives.

The first is to look for evidence of what happened less than a thousandth of a thousandth of a second after the big bang.

During this time, scientists believe that space itself could have expanded rapidly in a process called inflation, which would have influenced the distribution of matter in the cosmos.

The second goal is to study the history of galaxy formation, ranging from the first stars to light after the Big Bang, to today’s galaxies.

SphereX will do this by studying the faint glow created by all the galaxies in the universe, allowing scientists to decipher how the first galaxies initially formed stars.

Finally, the mission aims to look for water ice and frozen organic molecules around the newly formed stars in our galaxy, which can provide key clues to life outside our planet.

NASA explained: “Water ice gushes over the dust grains of cold, dense gas clouds across the galaxy. Young stars form within these clouds and planets form from disks of excess material. around these stars.

Frost on these disks could sow planets with water and other organic molecules. In fact, water from Earth’s oceans is likely to start as interstellar ice. Scientists want to know how often life-sustaining materials such as water are incorporated into young planetary systems.

“This will help them understand how common planetary systems are common throughout the cosmos.”