NASA’s newest space telescope rocketed into orbit Tuesday to map the entire sky like never before — a sweeping look at hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow since the beginning of time.

The $488 million Spherex mission aims to explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments.

It rocketed toward orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The US space agency said the telescope will help explain how galaxies formed a