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The Herschel Space Observatory is a proposed mission of the European Space Agency. It will be launched in February, 2007 abord an Ariane 5 rocket and will enter a position 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth at the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system.

The mission was formerly titled the Far Infrared and Sub-millimetre Telescope (or FIRST). It will be the first space observatory to cover the full far infrared and submillimetre waveband, and its telescope will have the largest mirror ever deployed in space (three and a half metres wide). It will specialise in collecting light from distant and poorly known objects, such as newborn galaxies thousands of millions of light-years away. The light will be focused onto three instruments with detectors kept at temperatures close to absolute zero.

Mission objectives:

• To study the formation of galaxies in the early universe and their subsequent evolution.
• To investigate the creation of stars and their interaction with the interstellar medium
• To observe the chemical composition of the atmospheres and surfaces of comets, planets and satellites
• To examine the molecular chemistry of the universe

The mission is named after Sir William Herschel, who discovered the infrared spectrum.

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