Mapping the heavens: Artist's rendering of the GLAST spacecraft in orbit above Earth.

Credit: General Dynamics

Related articles

• Cosmic blast is 7.5-billion-year-old gamma ray burst
• Cosmic explosion is shot in the dark
• Black hole spins at the limit
• Cosmic explosion from nowhere
• "Death Star" blasting galactic neighbour

WASHINGTON DC: A high-tech telescope NASA plans to launch tonight will fling open a new window on the universe, exploring extreme sources of gamma-rays that point to powerful and exotic phenomena.

The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, will search for energy blasts that point to black holes and other beasts, and hunt for clues to explain the strange, magnetized neutron stars known as pulsars.

Mysteries of dark matter

The telescope may also unlock the mysteries of dark matter, which comprises about 25 per cent of mass in the Universe but is invisible to the naked eye, compared with the five per cent of visible matter.

The remaining 70 per cent is known as dark energy, a little understood phenomenon, which is believed to speed the expansion of the Universe.

Scientists hope to gain vital information about the birth and evolution of the cosmos and study how black holes can spew jets of gas at stupendous speeds, according to the U.S. space agency NASA.

"GLAST will give us a spectacular high-energy gamma-ray vision," GLAST deputy project scientist David Thompson told a press conference. "The Universe looks remarkably different outside the narrow range of colours in the spectrum that we can see with our eyes."

Brilliant swath of light

The telescope will be blasted into space aboard a Delta II rocket scheduled to be launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on June 11, starting at 03:15PM GMT (01:15AM Thursday, Sydney time). It will be placed into a relatively low orbit, around 565 kilometres above the Earth.

GLAST will be used in a project lasting between five and 10 years aimed at examining gamma-ray phenomena in closer detail than before.

"There's a broad science community that's anxiously awaiting this launch," said Steven Ritz, a GLAST project scientist and astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre. "It's about to open up the Universe to us in new and exciting ways," in particular the "last unexplored regions of the electromagnetic spectrum," he said.

Most astrophysical phenomena cannot be spotted with human vision.

Through gamma-ray eyes, though, "the Milky Way would be a brilliant swath of light, and you would see a sky constantly changing with objects dimming and brightening on different times scales, Thompson said.