It’s finally official: NASA’s next major telescope project will be the innovative Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). The space telescope is projected to launch to the gravitational eddy known as Earth-Sun L2—which is located one million miles from Earth, in the direction opposite the Sun—sometime in the 2020s. The telescope’s wide field instrument is expected to yield new insights into mysterious phenomena like dark energy and dark matter, while also bolstering the search for potentially habitable planets outside the Solar System. In this way, the project has been seen as an instrument that embodies “the best of both worlds” when it comes to observing the universe. Most telescopes specialize in either wide shots of the skies, or in extreme close-ups of individual objects, but WFIRST will be a multipurpose workhorse capable of excelling at either extreme.

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