NASA set to launch SPHEREx telescope to explore what happened right after Big Bang
The Hindu
NASA's SPHEREx telescope will explore the universe's origins, map galaxies, and search for water in the Milky Way.
NASA is preparing to launch a megaphone-shaped observatory on a mission to better understand what happened immediately after the Big Bang that initiated the universe and to search the Milky Way for reservoirs of water, a crucial ingredient for life.
The U.S. space agency's SPHEREx space telescope is tentatively scheduled to be launched on Friday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
SPHEREx - short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer - is looking to answer questions about the origin of the universe while mapping the distribution of galaxies.
Closer to home - relatively speaking - SPHEREx will look within our galaxy for reservoirs of water frozen on the surface of interstellar dust grains in large clouds of gas and dust that give rise to stars and planets.
The observatory during its planned two-year mission will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way, as it explores the origins of the universe and the galaxies within it. It will create a three-dimensional map of the cosmos in 102 colors -individual wavelengths of light.
The mission is intended to gain insight into a phenomenon called cosmic inflation, the rapid and exponential expansion of the universe from a single point in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that occurred roughly 13.8 billion years ago. By way of comparison, Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
"We have pretty good evidence that inflation occurred, but the physics driving that event is really uncertain," said cosmologist Olivier Dore of Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a SPHEREx project scientist.
