In the long human effort to read the universe's oldest light, NASA has chosen PRIMA — a far-infrared space telescope — as the inaugural mission of a newly created Probe Explorer class, with a $1.2 billion budget and a 2033 launch horizon. Where other great observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope fall silent, blocked by dust and the limits of their wavelength range, PRIMA is designed to listen — tracing how planets coalesce, how galaxies age, and how the heavy elements that compose life itself were scattered across cosmic time. Born from a decade survey's call for ambitious yet achiev