NASA is preparing to launch a megaphone-shaped observatory on a mission to better understand what happened immediately after the Big Bang that initiated the universe and to search the Milky Way for reservoirs of water,

NASA will load a piece of precious cargo worth half a billion dollars onto a Falcon 9 rocket, which will inject it into low Earth orbit (LEO). That cargo is SPHEREx—short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe,