NASA telescope was launched into space from California on Tuesday to explore the origins of the universe and search the Milky Way for hidden water reservoirs, a key element of a lifetime.
NASA’s megaphone-shaped Spherex, spectrometer for cosmic history, Ionization Age and ICE Explorer, is elevated on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket mount at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
In the planned two-year mission, the Observatory will collect data from more than 450 million galaxies and more than 100 million stars from the Milky Way. It will create a three-dimensional map of the universe in 102 colors (the wavelength of a single light ray) and will study the history and evolution of galaxies.
The mission aims to deepen understanding of a phenomenon known as cosmic inflation, referring to the rapid and exponential expansion of the universe starting from a single point within a second after the Big Bang that occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.
“Spherex really tries to grasp the origins of the universe – what happened in the first moments after the Big Bang,” said Phil Korgut, a Spherex instrument scientist at Caltech.
“The dominant theory that describes this is called inflation. As its name states, it proposes that the universe has undergone a huge expansion, expanding from smaller than the size of atoms, a multiplier of a billion times in just a fraction of a second,” Korgut said.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, agent of the Astrophysics Division at NASA’s headquarters, said Spherex will look for “the echoes in the Big Bang – a second after the Big Bang, the Big Bang that reverberated to the Spherex will be directly observed.”
Spherex will take pictures in various directions around the Earth, splitting light from billions of cosmic sources, such as stars and galaxies, into their component wavelengths to determine their composition and distance.
In our Milky Way, Spherex will look for reservoirs that freeze on the surface of interstellar dust particles in the gas and dust of the big clouds, causing stars and planets.
It will look for water and molecules, including carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide frozen on the surface of dust grains in molecular clouds, which are dense areas of gas and dust in interstellar space. Scientists believe that the reservoir of ice is bound to the dusty grains in these clouds as the place where most of the universe’s water forms and dwells.
Launched with Spherex are satellite constellations of NASA’s satellites (Unified Corona and Earth’s strata) missions to better understand the solar wind, which is the continuous flow of charged particles from the sun.
Solar winds and other vibrant solar events could cause space weather effects, causing severe damage to human technology, including interfering with satellites and triggering power outages.
The drilling task is to try to answer how the sun’s atmosphere transitions to the solar wind, how the structures in the solar wind form, and how these processes affect the Earth and the rest of the solar system.
The mission involves four suitcase-sized satellites that will observe the sun and its environment.
“Together they fuse the three-dimensional global vision of the solar corona (the atmosphere of the sun) because it turns into the solar wind, which is the material that fills our entire solar system,” said Punch Mission Sciention Viall of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
