NASA unveils plans to launch SphereX telescope in 2024 to find information about the Big Bang and signs of extraterrestrial life
- The Nasa SpasaX telescope will be launched between June 2024 and April 2025
- During its two-year mission, SphereX maps the entire sky four times
- The mission aims to find evidence of what happened immediately after the big bang
- It also detects traces of water ice and frozen organic molecules around the newly formed stars in the Milky Way.
This is one of the most fundamental questions in science – just how did our universe begin?
Now, NASA has announced ambitious plans to launch a new telescope into space to help shed light on this mystery.
The space telescope will be launched sometime between June 2024 and April 2025, and will find information about the Big Bang, as well as signs of life outside our planet.
NASA has agreed initial design plans for the space telescope, known as the Spectro-Photometer for Earth History, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), which is about the size of a subcompact car
NASA has agreed initial design plans for the space telescope, known as the Spectro-Photometer for Earth History, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), which is about the size of a subcompact car.
It is equipped with instruments to detect infrared light that is invisible to the human eye. These data can tell what materials are made, as well as the distance from Earth
During its two-year mission, SphereX maps the entire sky four times, creating a vast database of stars, galaxies, nebulas and other celestial objects.
The space telescope is NASA’s first to take a full-sky spectroscopy map in near-infrared, and will monitor 102 near-infrared colors.
Allen Farrington, SphereX project manager at NASA ‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said:’ That’s like going from black-and-white images to color; 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 billion billion seconds after the big bang.
During that time, scientists believe that space itself may have expanded rapidly in a process called inflation, which would have affected the distribution of matter in the cosmos.

The space telescope is equipped with instruments to detect infrared light that is invisible to the human eye. These data can tell what materials are made, as well as the distance from Earth

The SphereX space telescope will look for evidence of what happened less than a billion seconds after the big bang (stock image)
The second goal is to study the history of galaxy formation, ranging from the first stars to the aftermath of the Big Bang, all the way to modern day galaxies.
SphereX does this by studying the faint glow that created every galaxy in the universe, allowing scientists to discover how the first galaxies first created stars.
Finally, the mission aims to find water ice and frozen organic molecules around the newly formed stars in our galaxy, which may provide key clues to life outside our galaxy. planet.
NASA explained: ‘Water ice shines on dust particles in cold, dense gas clouds all over the constellation. Young stars come inside these clouds, and planets come from a disk of material left around these stars.
Nails in these disks can irritate planets with water and other organic molecules. In fact, the water in the Earth’s oceans began as interspecific ice. Scientists want to find out how often life-sustaining substances like water are introduced into young planetary systems.
‘This will help them understand how common planetary systems like ours are throughout the cosmos.’