NASA's newest space telescope has blasted off to map the entire sky like never before. Launched Tuesday night from California by SpaceX, the Spherex observatory will survey the sky every six months from an orbit over Earth's poles. Its infrared instruments are expected to provide a sweeping, wide-angle view of hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow. Scientists hope to learn how galaxies formed and evolved, and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments. NASA also packed four suitcase-size satellites onto the rocket to study the sun from their own polar orbit.