A new NASA Observatory was launched on 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 (spectrum abbreviation for the history of the universe, the time of reion and the ICES explorer) is designed to map all the heavenly sky, studying hundreds of millions of galaxies and rebuild how the universe was formed and evolved.
The launch had postponed several times since the end of February to give engineers more time to evaluate the rocket and its components, according to NASA, and more recently due to bad weather on the launch site.
The cone -shaped spacecraft finally rose on Tuesday at 8:10 pm PT on a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket of the Vandenberg space force base in California. Also for the trip to the orbit there were four satellites the size of a suitcase that NASA will display on a separate mission to study the sun.
The Spherex Observatory of $ 488 million will survey the entire sky four times during its two -year mission. The instruments of the spacecraft will observe the cosmos in 102 different colors, or wavelengths, which NASA has said that it is more than any previous mission.
The colors in the infrared range are essentially invisible to humans because infrared light has longer wavelength than the eye can see. However, in space, the infrared light of stars, galaxies and other heavenly objects carries key information about its composition, density, temperature and chemical composition.
A technique known as spectroscopy allows scientists to analyze infrared light, dividing it into different colors just like a prism can separate sunlight into a colorful rainbow. As such, the data collected by the Spherex Observatory will give researchers an idea of chemistry and other characteristics of hundreds of millions of galaxies in the universe.
NASA said that these observations could help scientists study how galaxies are formed, track the origins of water on the Milky Way and rebuild what happened after the Big Bang that created the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.
