NASA's newest space telescope rocketed toward 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.
The USD 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 1,110 pounds (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