Nasa's new space telescope

Can you imagine being able to scan the entire sky, millions of miles away? That's what's about to happen...

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First, there was the Hubble Space Telescope, then the much more advanced James Webb and now there's SPHEREx.

Nasa launched its new addition to its fleet of space telescopes on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California earlier this month – and it's apparently just as impressive as its long name suggests.

SPHEREx stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer.

SPHEREx is on a two-year mission to explore the cosmos in "near-infrared light" that, although not visible to our eyes, "will serve as a powerful tool to answer cosmic questions". The telescope will observe hundreds of millions of galaxies near and far – some so distant their light has taken 10 billion years to reach Earth.