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

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

Now NASA has unveiled ambitious plans to launch a new telescope into space to 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 and signs of life outside our planet.

NASA has approved preliminary design plans for the space telescope, the so-called 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 that is invisible to the human eye. This data can reveal what objects 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 NASA’s first to create a full-sky spectroscopy map in near infrared and observe a total of 102 near infrared colors.

Allen Farrington, the SphereX project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said, “It’s like going from black and white images to color; it’s like going from Kansas to Oz. ‘

The SphereX mission has three main objectives.

The first is to look for evidence of what happened less than a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

At the time, scientists believe that space itself may have expanded rapidly in a process called inflation that would have affected the distribution of matter in the cosmos.

The second goal is to study the history of galaxy formation, ranging from the first stars that formed after the Big Bang to the present day galaxies.

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

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

NASA explained, “Water ice shimmers on dust particles in cold, dense gas clouds across the Milky Way. Young stars form in these clouds, and planets are formed from discs of leftover material around those stars.

Ice in these discs could litter planets with water and other organic molecules. In fact, the water in Earth’s oceans most likely started out as interstellar ice. Scientists want to know how often life-sustaining materials such as water are absorbed into young planetary systems.

“This will help them understand how common planetary systems like ours are all over the cosmos.”