A new NASA observatory launched into space Tuesday on a mission that could help scientists unravel what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
The SPHEREx mission (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) is designed to map the entire celestial sky, studying hundreds of millions of galaxies and piecing together how the universe formed and evolved.
The launch had been postponed several times since late February to give engineers more time to assess the rocket and its components, according to NASA, and most recently because of bad weather at the launch site.
The cone-shaped spacecraft finally lifted off Tuesday at roughly 8:10 p.m. PT atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Also along for the ride into orbit were four suitcase-sized satellites that NASA will deploy on a separate mission to study the sun.
The $488 million SPHEREx observatory will survey the whole sky four times over its two-year mission. The spacecraft’s instruments will observe the cosmos in 102 different colors, or wavelengths, which NASA has said is more than any previous mission.
Colors in the infrared range are essentially invisible to humans because infrared light has longer wavelengths than what the eye can see. In space, however, infrared light from stars, galaxies and other celestial objects carries key information about their composition, density, temperature and chemical makeup.
A technique known as spectroscopy allows scientists to analyze infrared light, splitting it into different colors much like how a prism can separate sunlight into a colorful rainbow. As such, data gathered by the SPHEREx observatory will give researchers insight into the chemistry and other characteristics of hundreds of millions of galaxies in the universe.
NASA said these observations could help scientists study how galaxies form, trace the origins of water in the Milky Way, and piece together what happened after the Big Bang that created the universe around 13.8 billion years ago.
