NASA’s newest flagship space telescope lifted off Sunday, beginning an ambitious years-long mission to chart the universe in extraordinary detail and probe some of modern physics’ most enduring questions.
Built to capture sweeping, wide-field views of deep space, the Roman Space Telescope “will help unlock the secrets of the universe,” US President Donald Trump said Friday during a ceremony at NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas.
The advanced observatory, which stands more than 12 meters tall, launched at 7.26am from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
More than a decade in the making and costing over $4 billion, the telescope honors Nancy Grace Roman, the trailblazing American astronomer widely remembered as the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in championing NASA’s famed space telescope.
Hubble transformed astronomy by showing that the universe is expanding faster than scientists once believed. Roman is designed to push that legacy further, focusing on unresolved cosmic puzzles such as dark matter and dark energy.
The more than 12-meter-tall observatory launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7.26am on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket
The $4 billion-plus telescope, developed over more than 10 years, is named for pioneering American astronomer Nancy Grace Roman
A NASA-provided image shows a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the Roman Space Telescope as it lifts off from Kennedy Space Center
‘Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe,’ NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in April when he unveiled the project to the press.
With a field of view more than 100 times larger than Hubble’s – and significantly wider than James Webb’s – Roman will survey vast swaths of the sky from a vantage point 930,000 miles from Earth, which it will take about 100 days to reach.
Designed to work in tandem with other observatories such as Webb, which offers greater power and precision, Roman aims to discover thousands of exoplanets as well as tens of thousands of supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars.
‘It will be the biggest catalog of astronomical objects anybody’s ever produced, and it will help us understand how common are solar systems like our own,’ Dave Content, Roman’s technical manager, told AFP.
The new telescope will also shed light on two of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark matter and dark energy.
Their origins remain unknown, but together they are believed to make up about 95 percent of the universe.
Roman aims to discover thousands of exoplanets as well as tens of thousands of supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars
The new telescope will also shed light on two of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark matter and dark energy
SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches with NASA’S Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope onboard from Launch Complex 39A
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy side booster is seen as it approaches LZ-40 following the launch of NASA’S Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
Dark matter is thought to act as a kind of gravitational glue, while dark energy is believed to be a repulsive force driving the universe’s expansion.
With its infrared vision, Roman will be able to detect light emitted by celestial objects billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time and offering scientists a glimpse into the universe’s distant past and helping them better understand these two mysterious phenomena.
Roman’s observations will complement the work of the Rubin Observatory in Chile and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid probe, and are highly anticipated because they could challenge scientists’ understanding of the universe’s structure.
Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, said recent research suggests the way scientists have been thinking about the universe’s early expansion, based on the predictions of existing models, may be wrong.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, left, shakes hands with President Donald Trump before participating in a Congressional Space Medal of Honor ceremony at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on August 28, 2026
A journalist photographing the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Maryland in April 2026
‘Recent observations hint that our standard model of the universe is incorrect,’ she told a press conference on Saturday, adding that Roman will help clear that up.
‘It will definitively say, ‘Yeah, the model works, or it doesn’t.’ And if it doesn’t, it’s going to provide us with the precision and quality of data that will allow us to start to distinguish between those options.’
Scientists and the general public will have access to all of Roman’s data. But the sheer volume will be daunting, Content warned.
The telescope will be generating about 1.3 terabytes of data a day, ‘which means you basically can’t download the data to anybody’s laptop,’ he said.
For McEnery, the more data, the better.
‘I very much hope, and in fact expect, that the most exciting science from Roman will be a surprise, something we couldn’t predict, and that will set the stage for the next deeper set of questions for future missions to address.’
