NASA Launches Powerful New Roman Space Telescope from Florida

NASA launched a powerful new space telescope from Florida on Sunday, sending it on a journey to explore some of the biggest mysteries in space science. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The $4 billion telescope will study things like dark energy, dark matter, and planets outside our solar system. Scientists hope Roman will change what we know about the universe.

Roman will travel to a spot in space called Lagrange Point 2, which is about one million miles from Earth. The telescope's main mission is planned to last five years, but NASA says it may have enough fuel to keep working for five more years after that. There were some weather worries before the launch, but the rocket flew through blue skies and a few scattered clouds with no problems.

Roman will work alongside two other famous space telescopes — the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, and the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021. NASA compares Roman to a camera's wide-angle lens and Webb to a zoom lens. While Webb can peer very deeply into one small area of the sky, Roman can take wide, sweeping views that cover huge sections of the universe at once. Together, the telescopes give scientists both a close-up and a big-picture look at space.

"It will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe, while Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down," said Nicola Fox, the head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Roman has roughly the same sharpness of vision as Hubble, but it can scan the sky much faster. In fact, one month of Roman's observations could survey our entire Milky Way galaxy — a task that would take Hubble about 100 years.

One of Roman's biggest jobs will be to create the largest 3D map of the universe ever made. Its main survey will take more than a year and will cover more than two billion galaxies. This map will help scientists better understand dark energy and dark matter, two mysterious things that make up most of the universe but are very hard to study.

The universe began about 13.8 billion years ago in an event called the Big Bang, and it has been growing ever since. In 1998, scientists discovered that the universe is expanding faster and faster, and they think an invisible force called dark energy is the reason. Dark matter is different — it cannot be seen, but scientists know it is there because of the way its gravity pulls on galaxies and stars. Together, dark matter and dark energy make up about 95% of everything in the universe, while all the stars, planets, and things we can see make up only about 5%.

Roman will also search for exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars outside our solar system. The telescope is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets and give scientists the first detailed count of planetary systems that look like our own. "One of the most exciting aspects of Roman is its discovery potential," said cosmologist Mustapha Ishak of the University of Texas at Dallas. He noted that major observatories often make their biggest discoveries in areas scientists did not even expect before launch.

Roman's path to the launchpad was not always smooth. President Donald Trump tried during both his first and second terms in office to cut or end funding for the Roman telescope. However, Congress stepped in both times to keep the project going. In the end, Roman launched nine months ahead of schedule, which NASA called a big win for the program.