The new space telescope of the POT He took off Tuesday towards his orbit to study the entire sky as never before, offering a wide vision of hundreds of millions of galaxies and their cosmic glow shared from the beginning of time.
Spacex He launched the Spherex Observatory from California, placing it in a trajectory to fly over the Earth’s poles. Next to him traveled four satellites the size of a suitcase to study the sun. Spherex first detached from the upper stage of the rocket, floating in the darkness of the space with the blue earth in the background.
The Spherex mission, which costs $ 488 million, aims to explain how the galaxies formed over billions of years, and how the universe expanded rapidly in its first moments.
Closer to home, in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Spherex will look for water and other ingredients of life in the frozen clouds between the stars where new solar systems emerge.
Spherex, cone -shaped and a weight of 500 kilograms (1,110 pounds), Equivalent to that of a tail piano, it will take six months to map all the sky with its infrared eyes and its wide field of vision. Four polls from the full sky are planned in a period of two years, while the telescope surrounds the pole to pole to 400 miles (650 kilometers) high.
Spherex will not see the galaxies with the same level of detail as NASA HUBBB and Webb Space Telescials, which have narrower fields of vision.
Instead of counting galaxies or focusing on them, Spherex will observe the total glow produced by all of them, including the oldest formed after the Big Bang, the event that created the universe.
“This cosmological glow captures all the light emitted throughout cosmic history”Said the chief scientist of the mission, Jamie Bock, of the California Institute of Technology. “It is a very different way of observing the universe,” allows scientists to see which light sources may have been lost in the past.
When observing the collective glow, scientists hope to identify the light of the earliest galaxies and learn how to exist, Bock said.
“We will not see the Big Bang. But we will see the consequences of this and learn about the beginning of the universe in that way ”he said.
Infrared detectors of the telescope can distinguish 102 invisible colors for the human eye, producing the most colorful and inclusive map ever performed on the cosmos.
It is like “Look at the universe through a pair of rainbow glasses”said project deputy director Beth Fabinsky, from NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory.
To maintain infrared detectors at extremely cold temperatures –210 degrees Celsius (-350 degrees Fahrenheit) -Spherex looks unique. It presents three honeycomb aluminum cones, one inside the other, to protect yourself from the sun and heat from the earth, resembling a 3 -meter (10 feet) cone -shaped necklace for a sick dog.
In addition to the telescope, Spacex’s Falcon rocket served as a transportation from the Vanderberg base of the Vandenberg space force for a NASA satellite quartet called Punch. From their own separate polar orbit, the satellites will observe the crown of the sun, or outer atmosphere, and the resulting solar wind.
The evening launch was delayed two weeks due to problems with rocket and other inconveniences.