During its six-year long mission, WFIRST will monitor 400 million galaxies and 2,600 closer exoplanets. NASA For decades now, the Hubble telescope has allowed researchers and the public to see the universe up close and personal.

It’s been an exciting ride full of fascinating photos, but Hubble’s place as NASA’s flagship telescope may soon come to an end because the space agency just announced that it will begin construction of its next telescope, dubbed the “Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope” (WFIRST), this year.

Originally, the WFIRST project was meant to start in 2017. However, Congress dramatically upped the budget from $16 million to $90 million dollars, which allowed NASA to jumpstart construction, reports Ars Technica. The hope for the new telescope is to find a ton of new exoplanets that may harbor alien life as well as unraveling some of the fundamentally baffling aspects of the cosmos like how dark energy works.

So how’s it any different from any other telescope NASA has launched? Well, for starters, it’s way more powerful and has a field of view 100 times that of Hubble. Here’s a picture to put it in perspective:

During its six-year long mission, WFIRST will monitor 400 million galaxies and 2,600 closer exoplanets. Also, besides looking for new objects in the sky, astronomers believe that the highly detailed data provided by WFIRST may aid them in the quest to understand how dark energy works by keeping tabs on so many galaxies over a long period of time. In a way, WFIRST is a lot like an older telescope called WISE that launched in 2009. After recording a massive number of objects, NASA turned WISE’s attention to the asteroid belt. WFIRST will basically be WISE’s big brother, armed with more tools. However, that hasn’t stopped WISE from making a few crazy discoveries lately.

In order for all this to happen, NASA’s first goal is to transform an old spy satellite, which was donated to the agency in 2012 by the National Reconnaissance Office, into a telescope, a task that little is known about but sounds completely awesome.

Since these things take a lot of time and testing, NASA hopes to launch the new telescope within the next decade. You can read more about it over at Ars Technica.