NASA to launch new mission to survey galaxies

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 29 (Xinhua) -- NASA is targeting late February to launch a new mission to survey hundreds of millions of galaxies to explore the origins of the universe.

The mission, named the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), will provide the first all-sky spectral survey, according to NASA.

Over a two-year planned mission, 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.

In the Milky Way, the mission will search for water and organic molecules in stellar nurseries, regions where stars are born from gas and dust, as well as disks around stars where new planets could be forming, according to NASA.