During its two-year mission, SphereX will map the entire sky four times, creating an enormous database of stars, galaxies, nebulas and other celestial objects.

The space telescope will be NASA’s first to build a full-sky spectroscopy map in near-infrared, and it will observe a total of 102 near-infrared colours.

Allen Farrington, the SphereX project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said: ‘That’s like going from black-and-white images to colour; it’s like going from Kansas to Oz.’