“You have about as much chance as the Hubble Telescope has of finding that at the centre of each black hole there’s a little man with a flashlight trying to find the circuit breaker.” Sheldon, Big Bang Theory

So the Hubble Telescope was outstanding in its day, but now NASA has developed – and blasted in to space – the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, to hopefully answer questions about what exactly is ‘up there’.

Launching from the Kennedy Space Centre last Wednesday, a Delta 2 rocket fired the telescope to its destination in an impressive 90 minutes. Costing $690m the telescope will pick up where its predecessor, the Energetic Gamma-ray Experiment Telescope, or EGRET, left off eight years ago. The GLAST is much faster that the previous model – scanning the entire universe in three hours, compared to EGRET’s 15 months.

“We live in a universe in which we don’t understand what 96 percent of the matter is,” explained Peter Michelson, principal investigator of GLAST’s Large Area Telescope. “GLAST may give us important clues as to the nature of that dark matter.”

In addition to the dark matter, GLAST will seek to explore the universe’s most extreme environments. The telescope will search for a better understanding of the invisible high-energy bursts known as “gamma rays”.

EGRET did find hundreds of possible sources of radiation, but the majority of them were never identified. If the new telescope does find where those explosions originated, it would still only scratch the surface of what the scientists involved hope to learn.

“Cosmic rays are probably one of the oldest mysteries in astrophysics,” Michelson said. “The origin of where those particles come from and what is responsible for accelerating them at very high energies is really the question.”

GLAST could give us even more insight in to the origins and evolution of our universe.

“Understanding that is part of understanding our role,” Michelson noted. “GLAST will allow us to do that.”

The telescope will scan the universe for five years, but researchers could extend this to nearer ten. The telescope will also be re-named after NASA held a contest online to come up with something better than GLAST – more than 12,00 entries were submitted.