Nasa’s new flagship observatory launched from Florida on Sunday on a mission to probe some of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a roughly US$4-billion project, lifted off at 7.26am local time from Launch Complex 39A at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. There had been weather concerns beforehand, but the rocket carried the telescope up through blue skies and scattered cloud.
The telescope is designed to investigate cosmic enigmas such as dark energy and dark matter, while also testing gravity at vast scales and searching for exoplanets, as planets beyond our solar system are called.
Roman will travel towards an orbital location called Lagrange Point 2, about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth. Its mission is planned for five years, though Nasa said it may have enough fuel for another five.
It is named for Nancy Grace Roman, Nasa’s first chief astronomer and the driving force behind the agency’s Great Observatories programme. Known as the mother of Hubble, she argued for space-based telescopes that could see above Earth’s hazy atmosphere and for making their data freely available to researchers. The observatory carries a 2.4m primary mirror, the same size as Hubble’s.
“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,” Nicola Fox, chief of Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate, told reporters on Saturday.
Wide angle and zoom
“Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as Hubble, but we survey the sky much faster,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. One month of Roman observations can survey the whole of the Milky Way, she said: “One month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble.”
Webb, launched in 2021, has reshaped understanding of the early universe, finding among other things that primordial galaxies formed sooner and were bigger than previously known. It can look across vast distances and back into deep time, because of the time it takes light to travel.
Roman instead takes panoramic views. Nasa likens Roman to a camera’s wide-angle lens and Webb to a zoom lens.
“Webb is designed to be able to probe very deeply and with exquisite sensitivity into the universe, so we can find rare things in the early universe,” McEnery said, while Roman offers “the large vision that complements the deep views that Webb provides”.
Roman will help in the understanding of dark energy and dark matter by creating the most comprehensive 3D map of the universe to date. Its main survey, which will take more than a year to complete, will cover more than two billion galaxies.
The Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago initiated the universe, and it has been expanding ever since. Scientists disclosed in 1998 that the expansion was accelerating, with an invisible force called dark energy the hypothesised reason. Ordinary matter – stars, planets, gas, dust and all the familiar stuff on Earth – represents perhaps 5% of the universe’s contents. Dark matter, known through its gravitational influence on galaxies and stars, may represent about 27%, and dark energy about 68%.
Using Roman to gauge dark matter’s pull and dark energy’s push across the universe will bring scientists closer than ever to solving both mysteries, according to Nasa.
Roman will also conduct one of the most comprehensive searches yet for exoplanets. It is expected to discover thousands and to provide the first statistical census of planetary systems similar to our own.
“One of the most exciting aspects of Roman is its discovery potential. Historically, major astronomical observatories have often made their most important breakthroughs in areas that scientists did not anticipate before launch,” cosmologist Mustapha Ishak of the University of Texas at Dallas, a member of Roman’s scientific collaboration, told Reuters.
Roman joins an era in which ground-based astronomy is under growing pressure from the sky itself. South Africa’s radio astronomers have warned that the legal shield around the Karoo reserve, which protects MeerKAT and the SKA-Mid telescope under construction there, stops at ground level and does not reach satellites transmitting into it from orbit.
US President Donald Trump’s administration tried during both his first and second terms to reduce or eliminate funding for Roman, but Congress preserved it. The launch comes nine months ahead of schedule, according to Nasa. – Joey Roulette and Will Dunham, (c) 2026 Reuters
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