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

It’s one of the most fundamental questions in science – exactly how did our universe begin?

Now, NASA has unveiled ambitious plans to launch a new telescope into space to help unravel this mystery.

The space telescope will be launched between June 2024 and April 2025 and will look for clues about the Big Bang, as well as signs of life beyond our planet.

NASA has approved preliminary design plans for the space telescope, called the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, the Reionization Age, and the Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), which is about the same size as a subcompact machine.

It is equipped with instruments for detecting infrared light invisible to the human eye. These data can reveal what objects they are made of, as well as their distance from the 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 the first NASA to build a map of full near-infrared spectroscopy and will observe a total of 102 colors in near-infrared.

Allen Farrington, SphereX project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said: “It’s like switching from black and white to color images; 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.

During this time, scientists believe that space itself could have expanded rapidly in a process called inflation, which would have influenced the distribution of matter in the cosmos.

The second goal is to study the history of galaxy formation, ranging from the first stars to the aftermath of the Big Bang, to current galaxies.

SphereX will do this by studying the faint glow created by all the galaxies in the universe, allowing scientists to decipher how the first galaxies originally formed stars.

Finally, the mission aims to look for water ice and frozen organic molecules around the newly formed stars in our galaxy, which could provide key clues for life beyond our planet.

NASA explained: “Water ice shines dust grains in cold, dense clouds of gas across the galaxy. Young stars form inside these clouds, and planets form from disks of material left around those stars.

“The ice in these disks could sow the planets with water and other organic molecules. In fact, the water in Earth’s oceans most likely began as interstellar ice. Scientists want to know how often life-supporting materials, such as water, are incorporated into young planetary systems.

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