Nasa to launch Spherex telescope to find what happened right after the Big Bang

American space agency Nasa will launch the ambitious Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer telescope on March 1. The SPHEREx Observatory will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way in order to explore the origins of the universe. The telescope will try to understand what happened immediately after the Big Bang that initiated the universe and to search the Milky Way for reservoirs of water, a crucial ingredient for life. Not just outside the galaxy, SPHEREx will look within our Milky Way galaxy for reservoirs of water frozen on the surface of interstellar dust grains in large clouds of gas and dust that give rise to stars and planets. "We have pretty good evidence that inflation occurred, but the physics driving that event is really uncertain," said cosmologist Olivier Dore of Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a SPHEREx project scientist.