Early Sunday morning (US time), NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. This new flagship observatory, with a budget of $4.3 billion, has begun its journey to unravel the greatest mysteries of astrophysics and cosmology.
The Roman telescope is heading to Lagrange Point 2, where it will join the James Webb Space Telescope in an orbit around the Sun, about 1.6 million kilometers from Earth. The journey is expected to take more than three months. The official mission duration is five years, but NASA says the telescope could operate for an additional five years thanks to its refuelable design, provided a robotic fuel tanker arrives within the next decade.
About the size of a bus, Roman is designed to survey cosmic mysteries, test gravity on unprecedented scales, and search for exoplanets. Scientists expect Roman to discover thousands of new planets and provide the first statistical census of planetary systems similar to our own solar system.
Ordinary matter—stars, planets, gas, dust—makes up only about 5% of the universe, while dark matter accounts for roughly 27% and dark energy about 68%. Roman is expected to shed light on these two enigmatic components, which have never been directly observed.
The telescope's primary survey, planned to be completed in over a year, will cover more than 2 billion galaxies. This galaxy catalog will help scientists measure the universe's expansion rate under the influence of these mysterious forces.
“It will find thousands of supernovae, tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies, and tens of billions of stars,” said Nicky Fox, director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “With its wide field of view, it will do things never done before.”
The Roman telescope launched nearly a year ahead of schedule and within budget. It is also the first NASA space telescope named after a woman—Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, who passed away in 2018 at age 93.
Roman's field of view is more than 100 times wider than Hubble's, allowing it to capture sweeping panoramas of the universe while Webb acts as a zoom lens for detailed views of ancient objects. “It's like Hubble and Webb peeking through a keyhole into the universe, but Nancy Grace Roman will throw the door wide open,” Fox said.
The three space telescopes will work together with the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile to decipher the universe's greatest mysteries.
Although the Trump administration repeatedly sought to cut or cancel the project during both terms, the US Congress intervened each time to protect funding for the Roman telescope.
