CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A NASA probe designed to lift a "cosmic fingerprint" from the universe's most ancient light is on its way into deep space following a perfect launch Saturday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
And like a team of stellar private eyes, scientists with NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) mission hope to use the information the probe will gather during the next two years to recognize which of the many suspects they have for explaining the nature and destiny of the universe is guilty.
"We are tremendously excited about this mission because it will help answer basic questions that people have been asking for ages," said Charles Bennett, principal investigator for the $145 million mission based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
But first the small Explorer-class probe will have to arrive on station at a point some one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth.
The journey began Saturday at 3:46:46 p.m. EDT (1946:46 GMT) at Launch Complex 17B as a Boeing-built Delta 2 rocket lifted off on an 85-minute satellite delivery mission.
Despite the threat of bad weather and a trio of last-minute problems, the countdown led to an on time liftoff and another success for Boeing's workhorse Delta 2 launcher, which for this mission flew in a new configuration that included only four solid rocket boosters, a third stage on the core vehicle and a 10-foot-diameter nose cone.
"Our job was to give MAP a safe ride into space," said Joy Bryant, Boeing's director of NASA Expendable Launch Programs. "The launch is a highly crucial part of the mission and we have put enormous time and effort into ensuring its success. Today all of that hard work paid off."MAP will spend the next three months circling Earth three times, flying increasingly more distant orbits, until on the fourth orbit the probe will cruise past the Moon and use the lunar gravity to fling it toward its final destination, a point in space known as L2.
Draw a line from the sun to the Earth and then extend that line about another million miles (1.6 million kilometers) into deep space and that's where L2 is.
Named for the 18th century French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, the L2 point is complemented by four others (L1 through L5) where gravity between the Earth and the sun sort of balance out, allowing a spacecraft positioned there to remain relatively stable.
After arriving at L2 it will take MAP about six months to scan the entire sky and literally map minute variations in the temperature of the faint light that makes up the cosmic background radiation that was created by the Big Bang, the widely-accepted theory that attempts to explain the earliest moments of the universe.
With instruments more sensitive to this background microwave noise than any previously flown, MAP will reveal tiny patterns in the light that "hold the keys for understanding the history, the content, the shape and the ultimate fate of our universe," Bennett said.
"Each cosmic scenario that people come up with predict a certain pattern for this light on the sky -- a certain cosmic fingerprint. MAP will measure the true pattern of the sky -- the real cosmic fingerprint. Then we'll be able to match that against the different cosmic scenario ideas that people have and from that we'll be able to pick the right cosmic scenario," Bennett said.
MAP will survey the sky several times to make sure the measurements are correct and the first results are expected about 18 months from now, officials said.
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