NASA launches the Roman telescope, one hundred times more powerful than Hubble

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off Sunday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Its mission: to map billions of galaxies, hunt for dark matter, and discover tens of thousands of exoplanets.

The launch went off without a hitch. About thirty minutes after liftoff, the telescope separated from its launch vehicle and is now hurtling towards its orbital point, approximately one and a half million kilometers from Earth. A hundred-day journey awaits it before it begins its observations.

“What a glorious launch dawn,” said Jackie Townsend, project manager on Roman, at the press conference following the liftoff. “The trajectory was magnificent. It put us exactly where we wanted us.”

The telescope's field of view is a hundred times wider than that of Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope, according to NASA. Where those instruments scrutinize narrow portions of the sky, Roman will sweep across vast panoramas, allowing scientists to map billions of galaxies and study the distribution of matter at different cosmic epochs.

“Roman will change the way we look at the Universe,” said NASA Administrator Nicky Fox. “It will discover tens of thousands, maybe even one hundred thousand new exoplanets.” One of the mission’s priorities is to determine if some of these distant worlds could be habitable by analyzing the composition of their atmospheres.

The telescope will orbit the Sun at the same distance as the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021. This position, four times farther away than the Moon, was chosen to prevent infrared radiation from Earth and the Moon from interfering with the cameras sensitive to thermal light, as astronomer Jenifer Millard explains. Hubble, on the other hand, has been orbiting just 480 kilometers above the Earth's surface since 1990.

Dark matter and dark energy are two of the mission's major scientific targets. Invisible, they together are thought to make up about 95% of the total content of the Universe: dark matter acts like gravitational glue, while dark energy is considered the repulsive force that accelerates the expansion of the Universe. "We know they exist, we see their effects, but what they are remains a real mystery," Millard summarizes.

Donald Trump called in to NASA's press conference Sunday morning to congratulate the teams. "You are the best in space, and we have the best country in the world. Keep it up," the US president said.

The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018), the first woman to hold a leadership position at NASA and the agency's first chief astronomer in the 1960s. She was instrumental in securing funding from the U.S. Congress for the Hubble Space Telescope and later cited the discovery of dark energy as the instrument's most significant achievement. Its initial lifespan is set at five years, with the goal of operating for ten years.