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CNN Saturday Morning News

NASA Mission Could Give Glimpse of Early Universe

Aired June 30, 2001 - 08:21   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: So, how do you snap a baby picture of something that's about 12 or 13 billion years old? Well, you call NASA, that's what you do. There are a lot of scientists at NASA. This is a big day for them because if all goes well at 3:46 p.m. Eastern Time from the Kennedy Space Center, actually, Cape Canaveral, to be accurate, a delta rocket will carry a spacecraft called MAP on its way to a place called lagrange point. Now, I'll give you more on that in just a moment.

But let me just tell you where to go on the Web to find out more about this. And this sounds self-serving, but it's true, a good place to start is CNN.com/space where we have a good overview of this mission. It's a $145 million mission and the idea is to detect cosmic microwave background information.

Let's take a look at the spacecraft as it will look as it travels through space. Most of it is shielded, as you can see there. There's a shield over there. That's the scientific meat of the MAP spacecraft. You can link from the CNN site to several NASA sites at the Goddard Space Flight Center and it'll tell you about the goal of this mission. The cosmic microwave background is essentially the early residual from the big bang. The big bang obviously created a lot of heat, which created a lot of microwave background information. These pictures tell scientists a tremendous amount about what was happening in the, at the beginning of the universe and about its expansion.

You can go a little bit further and there's a series of images explaining exactly how the instruments will be working on this $145 million mission. So there's some other images. This came from the cosmic background explorer, which was one of the first missions to take a look at this cosmic background radiation, which was discovered in the '60s.

Take a look at this page. This is kind of neat. It's got several animations. You can make them go all at once. You can see all about how these, this spacecraft is going to be traveling at various stages of its flight. As I told you, it's going to a place called the lagrange point. If you know a little bit about astronomy, lagrange is a spot, sort of a sweet spot in the universe between two orbiting bodies, say, the moon and the earth, where the spacecraft just kind of sits in equilibrium. MAP will take a three month trip out. It will sit there for 18 months, take these incredible pictures and we're almost certain they're going to send home some unprecedented shots of the universe at its earliest stages.

We'll be watching that mission for you. Once again, the launch scheduled for 3:46 p.m. Eastern Time. Weather kind of iffy right now. Stay with CNN, we'll let you know what happens.

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