NASA has made it official that its upcoming major telescope project is going to be the innovative Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). The space telescope is expected to launch to the gravitational eddy called Earth-Sun L2, which is present at the distance of one million miles from Earth. The telescope could be setup by the 2020s.

The wide field instrument of the telescope will probably give way to fresh insights into baffling phenomena such as dark energy and dark matter, at the same time also boosting the search for likely habitable planets beyond the Solar System.

Thus, the project has been termed as an important milestone in space technology and research. Generally, telescopes expertise in either wide shots of the skies, or in quite close-ups of individual objects, however, WFIRST is going to be a multipurpose workhorse that can excel at either extreme.

The telescope’s 7.8-foot aperture is going to capture pictures 100 times bigger as compared to the ones produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, without damaging the depth or resolution. In the mean time, its onboard coronagraph will bind out the glare of far away stars so accurately that scientists will possibly succeed in unraveling the atmospheric makeup of the planets that orbit them.

In a NASA statement, John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate said that WFIRST could open their eyes to the wonders of the universe, in a way similar to the one done by Hubble.

Grunsfeld added, “This mission uniquely combines the ability to discover and characterize planets beyond our own solar system with the sensitivity and optics to look wide and deep into the universe in a quest to unravel mysteries of dark energy and dark matter”.