CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- For thousands of years, people have contemplated the universe beyond.
How long has it all existed?
How much longer could it last?
A few of those questions may be answered after the launch of the Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or MAP, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station next month.
"The basic idea is that we're trying to learn about the history of the universe, its shape, its contents and its fate," said Chuck Bennett, the spacecraft's chief scientist, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"The way we're going to go about learning that is by making a picture of the entire sky in the light that's left over from the Big Bang."
The probe is scheduled to lift off June 30 aboard a Delta 2 rocket.
The spacecraft will look at cosmic microwave background radiation, the stuff created during the universe's first hundreds of thousands of years -- the equivalent of a baby's first 12 hours.
It will look at millions of points in the sky and measure the differences in temperature.
Because the differences in temperature are so slight -- to the millionth of a degree -- engineers have had to find ways to block out all interference so as not to skew the data.
"Measuring a part in a million is like measuring a cup of sand down to single grain," Bennett said.
One way they will try to get accurate measurements will be to park the spacecraft far from Earth, which emits lots of microwave radiation. Its magnetic field also could get in the way.
The probe will do its research from a distance four times that from Earth to the Moon.
But it won't orbit Earth. Instead, it will fly along with the planet on a yearlong journey around the Sun.
No other spacecraft has flown in this orbit. The Next Generation Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, may orbit along the same path after its launch later this decade.
Getting MAP to that orbit will not be easy. It will take three months and several swings around Earth to fling it to that location.
Once it's there, it is scheduled to send back data for at least two years.
The first full map of the sky should be ready about 18 months after launch, Bennett said.
Several other spacecraft have similar big-picture questions they will try to answer.
Hubble, for example, has peered to the universe's outer reaches, trying to determine a rough age of the universe.
But MAP is the only one to look at the actual light produced by the Big Bang. The radiation patterns are like the blueprints of the universe, Bennett said.
"I like things that are very fundamentally important," he said.
A previous spacecraft, called Cosmic Background Explorer, did similar research, but MAP aims to get a more accurate reading of the sky.
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