Artist's concept of Destiny spacecraft.

Destiny, the Dark Energy Space Telescope, is lead by Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, based in Tucson, Arizona. If launched, Destiny's 1.65-meter near-infrared telescope will detect more than 3,000 Type Ia supernovae over the two-year primary mission, followed by a year-long survey of 1,000 square-degrees of the sky to measure how the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe has evolved since the Big Bang. The data from these two surveys will have 10 times better sensitivity than current ground-based projects to explore the properties of dark energy.

The spacecraft will use a specialized instrument known as a grism to simultaneously acquire the spectra of all objects in its field of view. The spacecraft itself will orbit the Sun at the second Lagrangian point, where the gravitational forces of the Sun, Earth, and Moon balance one another.