by A new NASA Space Observatory is scheduled to start orbit this week to map more than 450 million galaxies.
The SPHEREX mission (short for the spectro photometer for the history of the universe, the era of rice ionization and the ICES Explorer) will map the entire sky four times over two years and offer scientists the opportunity to examine how galaxies form and develop, and a window in the way the universe was created.
The SPHEREX observatory of the NASA will be carried out in Bae systems in Boulder, Col., tests in 2024.
“A fundamental question will answer: How did we come here?” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, reigning director of the Astrophysics department in the NASA headquarters, recently said in a news information.
The start of the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California is scheduled to take place on Saturday during a window that is open at 10:09 p.m.
Liftoff was initially planned for February 27th, but NASA rebuilt it several times, first “complete vehicle processing and preliminary round of the cash register” and due to the availability at the Californian starting point.
The cone-shaped spaceship together with four suitcase satellites, which NASA will use at a separate mission to examine the sun at the same time-will start on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The preliminary design for the spaceship, including hexagonal solar shields, which help to keep the instruments cool.
The Spherex mission of 488 million US dollars, which has been in development for about a decade, is said to reproduce the heavenly sky in 102 infrared colors -more than any other mission before, according to NASA.
Infrarot instruments in space are ideal to penetrate through dust and gas to see some of the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe that would otherwise be covered. (Colors in the infrared area are not visible to humans, since the infrared light has longer wavelengths than the eye can see.)
With a technique that is referred to as spectroscopy, scientists can divide the infrared light of stars and galaxies into different colors, similar to sunlight that hits a prism into a rainbow visible color tones. The spectra of an object can show many useful properties, including its composition, density, temperature and movement.
The Spherex Observatory will use its spectrometers to examine the sky in three dimensions and to measure these properties in hundreds of millions of galaxies, said Jamie Bock, main underweeper of the Spherex Mission and Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology.
Bock said these observations could unlock answers to galaxy formation and enable the observatory to examine the origin of water and other organic materials in our Milky Way.
“When dividing the light, we can use this to determine the distance to galaxies, to build this three -dimensional map, and we also see the fingerprints of water,” said Bock.
The persecution of the origins of water could not only help scientists to find out how life on earth developed. The work can also result in indications of where the most important lifestyles can be found elsewhere in our galaxy.
“This is a new ability, and with any new ability there is the potential for discoveries and surprises,” said Bock.
When charting the sky sky, the Spherex mission will also tackle one of the most ongoing secrets of astronomy: what happened in the first moments after the Big Bang that created the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.
A theory that was proposed in the late 1970s and early 1980s indicates that the universe was subjected to a remarkable Billion-Fast expansion in the first breaks one second after the Big Bang. The theory known as cosmic inflation was used to explain the flat geometry of the universe and the lack of curvature, and as a possible reason for how some of the largest structures in the universe – for example galaxies and galaxy clusters – are created.
But astronomers fought for a long time to drive cosmic inflation or why it happened at all. The Spherex mission could test the theory in a new way, since the exact distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies would help scientists to improve the physics of cosmic inflation and how such a rapid expansion could have occurred.
“What Spherex will do will test certain inflation models by tracking hundreds of millions of galaxies over the entire sky in three dimensions,” said Brock.
Domagal-Goldman said that studying the Spherex mission through galaxies, cosmic inflation and the origins of the universe could advance the understanding of humanity for basic physics.
“We are very privileged in the long history of human existence on this planet to live at a time when we can actually answer questions about the universe,” he said.
This article was originally published on nbcnews.com
