Nasa launches SphereX telescope in 2024 to search for clues about the big bang

This is 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 cast the mystery.

The space telescope will start sometime between June 2024 and April 2025 and will search for clues about the big bang, as well as signs of life outside 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 sub-compact car.

It is equipped with instruments to detect infrared light that is invisible to the human eye. This data can reveal what objects were made of, as well as their distance from the earth

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

The space telescope will be the first NASA to build a full-sky spectroscopy map in near-infrared, and it will observe a total of 102 near-infrared colors.

Allen Farrington, 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 that happened less than a billionth of a billionth 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 affect the distribution of matter in the cosmos.

The second purpose is to study the history of the formation of galaxies, ranging from the first stars that ignited after the Big Bang, to the modern galaxies.

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

Finally, the mission is aimed at searching for water ice and frozen organic molecules around the newly formed stars in our galaxy, which can provide important clues for life outside our planet.

NASA explained: ‘Water ice comes on dust grains in cold, dense gas clouds throughout the galaxy. Young stars form within these clouds, and planets form disks of remaining material around the stars.

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

“It will help them understand how common planetary systems like ours are throughout the cosmos.”