ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Joint Dark Energy Mission

Okay kiddo, so imagine you’re playing a game of catch with a friend, but you want to throw the ball farther than ever before. That’s kind of like what scientists want to do with the Joint Dark Energy Mission, or JDEM for short.

You know how when you throw the ball really hard, it goes up high in the sky before coming back down? Well, scientists want to launch a special type of camera up into space, way up high above the Earth, so that they can see really far and learn more about the universe.

But why do they want to learn more about the universe, you ask? That’s a great question! You know how you can’t see the air, but you know it’s there because you can feel it and you can see it move the leaves on the trees? Scientists know that there is something else in the universe that we can’t see, and they call it dark energy.

The problem is, nobody really knows what dark energy is or how it works. All we know is that it exists and it plays a big role in how the universe grows and changes over time.

So, scientists want to use JDEM to take pictures of a bunch of different galaxies and study how they’re moving away from each other. That way, they can try to figure out how much dark energy there is and how it’s affecting the universe.

It’s kind of like playing a game of soccer and trying to figure out how much wind there is and which way it’s blowing, so that you can aim your kicks and score more goals.

The JDEM mission is a big deal because if we can learn more about dark energy, we might be able to answer some really big questions about how the universe started and what its ultimate fate will be. Who knows, maybe we’ll even discover some new things we never even knew existed!