A NASA-funded concept for a 5.6-meter, 4 Kelvin space telescope targeting some of our most compelling questions: "How did we get here?", "How did the Milky Way and other galaxies form?", and "How do life-bearing planets form?" Origins targets the mid and far-infrared band, and provides more than a million fold increase in survey capability in this relatively unexplored regime. With powerful spectroscopic capability, Origins will unveil the hidden side of galaxy and black hole evolution, trace the trail of water from molecular clouds to proto-planetary disks, revolutionize our understanding of planetary system formation, and complete the census of the outer reaches of the Solar System.
The Origins study has been led at Goddard Space Flight Center. JPL leads the workhorse spectrograph spectrometer (Origins Survey Spectrometer OSS) covering 25 to 580 microns with background-limited sensitivity.