NASA’s newest space telescope rocketed into orbit Tuesday to map the entire sky like never before — a sweeping look at hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow since the beginning of time. SpaceX launched the Spherex observatory from California, putting it on course to fly over Earth’s poles. Tagging along were four suitcase-size satellites to study the sun. Spherex popped off the rocket’s upper stage first, drifting into the blackness of space with a blue Earth in the background. The $488 million Spherex mission aims to explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments. Closer to home in our own Milky Way galaxy, Spherex will hunt for water and other ingredients of life in the icy clouds between stars where new solar systems emerge. The cone-shaped Spherex — at 500 kilograms, or the heft of a grand piano — will take six months to map the entire sky with its infrared eyes and wide field of view. Four full-sky surveys are planned over two years, as the telescope circles the globe from pole to pole, 650 kilometers up. Spherex won’t see galaxies in exquisite detail like NASA’s larger and more elaborate Hubble and Webb space telescopes, with their narrow fields of view. Instead of counting galaxies or focusing on them, Spherex will observe the total glow produced by the whole lot, including the earliest ones formed in the wake of the universe-creating Big Bang…Read more