Telescope Seeks Evidence of the Universe’s Start

A Delta 2 rocket carrying a NASA telescope lifted off Thursday on a three-year, $204-million mission to look for the relics of the “big bang” that many believe brought the universe into being.

The 12-story blue-and-white rocket roared away from its Cape Canaveral launch pad through a fountain of fire and smoke at 8:44 a.m. PDT, punching through layers of thin, wispy clouds and arcing out across the Atlantic Ocean.

The liftoff was delayed by five minutes when a boat strayed into the danger area offshore.

It was the second successful launch of a Boeing-built Delta 2 this month, welcome news for the U.S. launch industry, which has recently suffered an expensive string of failures.

Nestled in the rocket’s nose cone is the space agency’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE. The 3,000-pound telescope was released from the rocket 76 minutes after launch and slipped into a circular orbit 477 miles above Earth, where it will peer into the corners of the Milky Way and beyond.

FUSE will use its ultraviolet instrument to sweep the sky for what scientists refer to as the “fossils” of the big bang.

“We have never had a satellite as sensitive as FUSE,” NASA science chief Ed Weiler said.

The telescope will measure quantities of hydrogen and deuterium, a form of hydrogen, believed to have been created after the big bang.

The balance of those elements will give insights into the conditions in the first few minutes after the big bang, how the elements are dispersed through the galaxies and what the vast gas clouds between stars are made of.

By determining how much matter was created in the big bang, scientists may answer a long-standing question in astronomy: Will the universe continue to expand forever or will it collapse back on itself in a “big crunch”?

The FUSE instrument was assembled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with help from the Canadian space agency.