NASA has just launched its newest space telescope, the Spherex Observatory, into orbit. This advanced telescope will be capable of mapping hundreds of millions of galaxies, significantly enhancing our understanding of the universe. SpaceX successfully launched the Spherex Observatory from its Starbase in California.
The $488 million Spherex mission aims to explore the presence of water and potential signs of life within the Milky Way galaxy. Additionally, the mission seeks to unravel the mysteries of galactic formation and evolution over billions of years while investigating the cause of the universe’s sudden expansion during its initial phase.
Furthermore, Spherex operates differently from previous NASA space telescopes, unlike Hubble and Webb who count galaxies and focus on them, Spherex will observe the Glow produced by early galaxies when they were formed, The scientist will remove the light for the earliest galaxies to understand hoe the came to be.
According to the Associated Press, the mission’s chief scientist Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology stated:
“This cosmological glow captures all light emitted over cosmic history,” He added “We won’t see the Big Bang. But we’ll see the aftermath from it and learn about the beginning of the universe that way,”
Jamie Bock
Additionally, the telescope includes Infrared detectors that will be capable of detecting 102 colours invisible to the naked human eye enabling the Telescope to depict the best colourful maps of the cosmos.
“looking at the universe through a set of rainbow-colored glasses,”
deputy project manager Beth Fabinsky of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.