NASA will launch a new mission in the year 2023 to track the universe and solve a few unresolved mysteries of space.
The two-year mission, known as ‘Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer’ and given the nickname SPHEREx, is designed to study two key questions. First, how the universe really evolved and second, how common a few ingredients of life are within the Milky Way.
The instrument will utilize near-infrared and optical light in order to study the sky and gather data from over 100 million stars in our galaxy and other 300 million galaxies.
While it surveys the sky, the instrument will also look for organic molecules as well as water which are both fundamental building blocks of life. Besides, SPHEREx will also look for traces about the origin of the universe by going beyond the Milky Way. The researchers hope that it will be able to manage and get answers to these two questions while it conducts the two distinct purviews.
The final result of the SPHEREx mission should offer a survey of the entire sky using 96 different color wavelengths. And just like the other missions of NASA, the SPHEREx mission may also help discover targets for the US agency’s upcoming missions.
