NASA launched its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Florida on Sunday, sending the observatory on a mission to study dark energy, dark matter and distant exoplanets. The bus-sized instrument now begins a journey of more than three months to reach its operating position.
The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, the late astronomer who served as NASA’s first chief astronomer and helped shape the agency’s early space science program. She is widely credited as a driving force behind the Hubble Space Telescope.
Roman will travel to a gravitationally stable point roughly 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, a location that keeps the observatory in a fixed relationship with the planet and the sun. From there it will scan wide fields of the sky in infrared light.
Its central goal is to probe what scientists call the hidden universe. Dark energy and dark matter together account for most of the cosmos yet cannot be observed directly, and Roman is built to measure their effects across vast stretches of space.
The telescope carries a primary mirror comparable in size to Hubble’s but offers a field of view far wider, allowing it to survey large sections of sky in single exposures. That capability is intended to let astronomers map hundreds of millions of galaxies over the course of the mission.
Roman is also designed to detect thousands of new exoplanets, including worlds far from their host stars, using a technique that watches for the way gravity bends light. The mission adds to a growing roster of orbital observatories following earlier efforts such as those examined in data returned from recent NASA deep-space missions.
Once it arrives at its destination, the observatory will undergo a commissioning period before beginning science operations. Engineers must calibrate its instruments and confirm the spacecraft functions as designed before the survey work starts.
NASA expects the mission to complement the James Webb Space Telescope, with Roman covering broad areas of sky while Webb studies narrower targets in greater detail. The two are intended to work in tandem across overlapping research questions.
The observatory will spend its transit period cruising toward the observation point over the coming months before controllers declare it operational.