(VIDEO) NASA Successfully Launches Its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to Study Dark Matter and Dark Energy

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s newest space telescope launched successfully Sunday morning, beginning a million-mile journey that scientists say will help unravel some of the biggest mysteries in the universe, including the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off at 7:26 a.m. Eastern time aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, according to NASA. The rocket’s 27 Merlin engines generated more than 5 million pounds of thrust as they pushed the vehicle away from Florida’s spaceport, with the roughly 18,000-pound spacecraft now beginning a journey of about three months to reach its permanent home in space, roughly a million miles from Earth.

Roman is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who died in 2018 at age 93 and was known as the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in championing that observatory decades earlier. The new telescope, about the size of a tour bus, will settle into orbit at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, known as L2, the same gravitationally stable location where the James Webb Space Telescope currently operates. At that point, the competing gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun allow a spacecraft to maintain a steady orbit while using minimal fuel, giving Roman an unobstructed view of deep space.

“It takes us a good three-plus months to get out there, and we’re spending that time checking everything out and doing a whole bunch of calibrations and making sure everything is working the way we know it can,” said NASA integration and test scientist Jeremy Perkins, according to NPR. “It’s basically like our time to kick the tires and just make sure that the focus is right, the pointing is right.”

Roman’s central design advantage over Hubble is scale. According to NASA, the new telescope will match Hubble’s image sharpness while offering a field of view at least 100 times larger, allowing it to capture vast swaths of the sky in a single observation rather than the comparatively narrow images Hubble has produced over more than three decades in orbit. Roman senior scientist Julie McEnery highlighted the scope of that capability during NASA’s live launch commentary, saying, “The scope is extraordinary. We will do a survey of our own Milky Way galaxy and find 20 billion stars. That would make it the largest catalog of astronomical objects that’s ever been produced,” according to Space.com.

Much of Roman’s science mission will focus on two of astrophysics’ most persistent puzzles: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter refers to the mysterious, invisible material whose gravitational influence appears to hold galaxies together, while dark energy is the poorly understood force believed to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. Roman will study dark matter by observing how gravity subtly bends the path of light traveling across vast cosmic distances, a technique that will help scientists map both ordinary and dark matter throughout large regions of the sky. To probe dark energy, the telescope will catalog a specific type of exploding star known as a Type Ia supernova, objects that shine with a known and predictable brightness and are sometimes called “standard candles” because of how reliably astronomers can use them to measure cosmic distances.

The telescope is also expected to dramatically expand the number of known planets beyond our solar system. Since astronomers first confirmed the existence of exoplanets in the 1990s, more than 6,000 have been identified. NASA expects Roman to identify more than 100,000 additional exoplanets by detecting the slight dips in starlight that occur when a planet passes in front of its host star, along with roughly 1,000 more through a separate technique called microlensing, which detects tiny changes in background starlight caused by the gravitational pull of a distant, otherwise invisible planet. The spacecraft will also demonstrate technology capable of directly blocking a star’s light in order to photograph planets orbiting it.

Roman’s origin traces back to a very different purpose. The spacecraft’s design was originally developed as a spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office before it was ultimately donated to NASA and repurposed for astrophysics research, giving the mission what NPR described as an unusual history compared with most scientific space telescopes.

Once operational, Roman is expected to generate an enormous volume of data, beaming back roughly 1.4 terabytes of raw science information each day through a refrigerator-sized high-gain antenna. That data will be made publicly available almost immediately through a cloud-based system called Roman Nexus, allowing scientists and members of the public alike to search the raw observations for new discoveries. “Roman’s database at the end of its prime mission after five years is going to be bigger than your standard music streaming platform,” Perkins said. He added that the scale of the dataset is part of what makes the mission distinctive. “It’s all the things that we are not expecting to see,” he said. “It’s all these one-in-a-million things that we’re going to be able to see with Roman that really excites me.”

Sunday’s launch had been targeted for months, with NASA and SpaceX conducting a formal Launch Readiness Review on Friday to confirm the mission was cleared to proceed. The launch marks the completion of years of development for the observatory, positioning Roman to begin science operations sometime after it reaches its L2 orbit and completes its initial checkout and calibration period this winter.