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NASA has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to help with an astrophysical mission called SPHEREx.
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SPHEREx, a space telescope, will be launched in 2024 via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for a two-year mission.
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The data collected will help astronomers understand how the universe was made, NASA said.
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NASA has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to orbit a telescope for a two-year astrophysical mission starting in 2024, the agency said in a press release on Thursday.
The mission, dubbed SPHEREx, will cost NASA approximately $ 98.8 million.
SPHEREx is a space telescope that NASA said would examine the sky in near-infrared light, which the human eye cannot see. The data it collects would help astronomers understand the evolution of the universe and the formation of galaxies, it said.
The mission was scheduled to launch in June 2024 and was to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex-4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, NASA said.
The mission would look for water and organic molecules in regions where stars are formed from gas and dust, and find out if new planets form around stars, NASA said.
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the 2019 mission would “yield an unprecedented galactic map with ‘fingerprints’ from the earliest moments in the history of the universe.”
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SpaceX said in a tweet on Thursday, the SPHEREx mission would collect data on more than 300 million galaxies and investigate how the universe formed.
NASA has selected a space telescope called SPHEREx for the 2019 mission, per Spaceflight Now.
SPHEREx is the latest in a long list of links between SpaceX and NASA.
The most recent agreement was agreed in November, when NASA certified SpaceX to allow astronauts to fly on its Crew Dragon spaceship, making it the first ever commercial spacecraft to receive the certification.
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