SpaceX has launched National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) latest astrophysics observatory called SPHEREx on Tuesday (Mar 11) from California observatory via Falcon rocket. The $488 million mission has been launched to understand the histories of galaxies, map the sky, and search for life-supporting elements such as water in the Earth-containing Milky Way galaxy.

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The SPHEREx mission, short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, will essentially try to understand what exactly, or rather how exactly, the universe expanded in the initial moments after the Big Bang.

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The SPHEREx has four small satellites that will make up PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, which will study 'how the Sun’s outer atmosphere becomes the solar wind.'

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“Everything in NASA science is interconnected, and sending both SPHEREx and PUNCH up on a single rocket doubles the opportunities to do incredible science in space,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a release. 

“Congratulations to both mission teams as they explore the cosmos from far-out galaxies to our neighbourhood star. I am excited to see the data returned in the years to come,” she added.

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The mission is aimed at mapping the galaxies in a wider manner, unlike Hubble or James Webb.

"The mission will use a technique called spectroscopy to measure the distance to 450 million galaxies in the nearby universe. It also will measure the total collective glow of all the galaxies in the universe, providing new insights about how galaxies have formed and evolved over cosmic time. To achieve its wide-ranging science goals, SPHEREx will create a 3D map of the entire celestial sky every six months," read the NASA release.

If successful in its goal, SPHEREx might be able to solve the most significant of the questions science faces—the origin of everything we see today.