The 725-million pounds project, undertaken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), US, will be launched in 2007 and will remain in orbit for 10 years.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) will take part in the project after NASA scientists decide the telescope's final design and scientific payload.

Three UK groups are playing a leading role to decide which scientific instruments Europe will provide for the HST's successor even as it continues to beam a series of amazing images and data ever since it was launched on April 25, 1990.

Space servicing missions and scientists have expressed hopethat HST would continue to operate till 2010. The proposed NGST, planned to be launched in 2007, would thus operate in parallel with its predecessor in the orbit.

The new space telescope is being designed to find answers to several fundamental questions like the shape of the universe, evolution of galaxies, formation and interaction of stars and planetary systems, life cycles of the matter in the universe, and what the dark matter is about, besides the age and nature of universe.

The unique feature of NGST is that it could detect the infrared radiation and see objects 400 times fainter than those studied with large ground based infrared telescopes. Its image sharpness (spatial resolution) enables study of objects that were formed in the beginning of the universe even as it is moving away from us at tremendous speed with stretched radiation, according to the science journal.

Although astronomers have good understanding of the evolution of the universe, almost nothing is known about the events which tookplace between one million and a few billion years after the ``Big Bang''. It is during this "dark age" that the first stars and galaxies began to form.

"At the moment, we can only see the tip of the iceberg. NGST will, however, allow us to see the dwarf galaxies which we believe are the building blocks for the big ones and the way they interact and grow into giant galaxies we see today," says the journal quoting Prof Martin Ward of Leicester University.

As NGST operates at infrared wave lengths for most of the time, it enables the scientists to study the most remote galaxies whose light largely reaches us at infrared wavelengths.

The design study for a multi-object infrared spectrograph undertaken by Roger Davies and his colleagues at Durham University, northern England, in collaboration with teams from France and Germany, is expected to yield more information about the composition, distance and speed of retreat of distant galaxies and quasars.

This would enable astronomers to map the thousands ofgalaxies in the universe as the new spectrographs allows much larger area for analysis, Davies said.