Work begins in Palo Alto on NASA’s dark energy hunter

Lockheed Martin is helping NASA begin the hunt for dark energy, a mysterious force powering the universe’s accelerating expansion. An instrument assembly the company is developing, if selected by NASA for production, will be the core of the primary scientific instrument aboard the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), whose mission aims to uncover hundreds of millions more galaxies and reveal the physics that shapes them.