NASA TELESCOPE WILL LOOK INTO BIG QUESTIONS.

Byline: Usha Sutliff Staff Writer

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE - NASA has chosen six teams of scientists, including some from Caltech and JPL, who will work toward answering two of our most basic and enduring questions: Where did we come from? Are we alone?

Using a space telescope designed to visually pierce giant clouds of gas and dust that block most of the universe from our view, the teams will study the formation of ancient galaxies, stars, planets and, eventually, life. It will also enable scientists to learn more about the disks of gas and dust around stars from which planets eventually form.

The mission is one of several that make up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Origins program, which seeks to understand our cosmic roots and search for extraterrestrial life.

The Space Infrared Telescope Facility, which these scientists will use to conduct their investigations, will be launched in July 2002.

One of the keys to success is cooling the telescope to near absolute zero, or around 460 degrees below zero, so the infrared telescope can peer into distant places in the universe without interference from the heat of a near-Earth environment, said Michael Werner, SIRTF project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The telescope will be launched into an Earth-trailing solar orbit that will allow it to cool rapidly.

``SIRTF is a cryogenic observatory for infrared astronomy from space,'' Werner said.

The six teams were chosen from 28 proposals submitted from around the globe. They will make up the SIRTF Legacy Science Program, which will involve American-led science teams worldwide.

The data from their observations will be released to NASA and the worldwide scientific community simultaneously in the forms of raw data and in atlases or catalogs, he said.

The SIRTF Science Center is based at Caltech and the SIRTF Project Office is at JPL.

The six projects will take up about 3,160 hours of the telescope's time during its first year of operation. They include:

--An effort, involving JPL scientists, to capture images of the most distant objects in the universe and help answer questions about the birth and evolution of galaxies to a distance of 12 billion light years.

--A Caltech-led project that will use SIRTF's camera to photograph an area of the sky equivalent to about 500 full moons. The images will help astronomers study the evolution of dusty galaxies up to 10 billion light years from Earth.

--A search for hidden stars in 75 nearby galaxies.

--A survey of the inner portion of the Milky Way galaxy, which astronomers anticipate will yield information about its structure and uncover details of the star formation process.

--A project involving JPL and Caltech scientists, among others, to study the process by which stars form out of giant molecular clouds of gas within our galaxy.

--A project, also involving Caltech astronomers, that will study the evolution of planetary systems from a sample of hundreds of stars up to 100 million years old.