NASA Launches Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

The agency's next flagship observatory is on its way to survey the dark universe, hunting dark energy, dark matter and distant exoplanets.

NASA has launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the agency's next flagship astrophysics mission, according to a NASA news release. The observatory is designed to probe some of the deepest open questions in cosmology, above all the nature of dark energy and dark matter, which together dominate the universe yet remain unexplained.

Roman carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror comparable in size to Hubble's, but its Wide Field Instrument covers a patch of sky roughly a hundred times larger in each infrared image. That combination will let it survey hundreds of millions of galaxies and chart how cosmic structure has grown over billions of years.

Beyond cosmology, the telescope is expected to discover thousands of exoplanets through gravitational microlensing and will test a coronagraph technology demonstrator that blocks starlight to image planets directly. The mission is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, widely regarded as the 'mother of Hubble.'

Following launch, the observatory will travel to an orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where it will be commissioned before beginning its multi-year survey campaign.