NASA’s $4 billion-plus Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, beginning a multi-year mission to survey enormous portions of the cosmos, discover distant worlds and investigate the still-unexplained nature of dark matter and dark energy.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now on its way to space after launching Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, beginning a mission designed to build the most extensive astronomical catalog ever assembled while giving scientists a powerful new tool for investigating some of the deepest unanswered questions about the universe.
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The more than 12-meter, or 39-foot, observatory lifted off from Florida at 7:26 a.m. EDT, or 1126 GMT.
More than a decade of development and over $4 billion went into the observatory, which will take a dramatically wider view of the sky than NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.
President Donald Trump highlighted the mission during a ceremony Friday at NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas, saying Roman “will help unlock the secrets of the universe.”
The telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, the pioneering American astronomer who became known as the “Mother of Hubble” because of her role in advancing the concept of a major space-based observatory.
Hubble ultimately transformed astronomy and helped establish that the universe is expanding faster than scientists had previously understood. Roman will tackle a different set of questions, including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, while conducting broad surveys of planets, galaxies, exploding stars and other astronomical objects.
“Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in April while introducing the project to reporters.
Roman’s defining advantage will be the amount of sky it can observe at once.
Its field of view is more than 100 times larger than Hubble’s and substantially wider than Webb’s, allowing the telescope to survey immense stretches of space instead of concentrating primarily on individual targets or relatively narrow fields.
Roman will eventually operate about 1.5 million kilometers, or approximately 930,000 miles, from Earth. The spacecraft is expected to need roughly 100 days to reach that vantage point.
From there, it will work alongside other major observatories rather than replacing them.
Webb offers greater sensitivity and precision for detailed observations, while Roman is designed to find and catalog astronomical targets across far larger portions of the sky. Scientists can then use Roman’s discoveries to identify objects and phenomena worthy of closer examination by other instruments.
“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.
Among the telescope’s expected discoveries are thousands of planets outside the solar system.
Roman is also projected to identify tens of thousands of supernovae — the powerful explosions associated with the deaths of massive stars — giving scientists an enormous collection of events that can be used to study both stellar evolution and the expansion of the universe.
Its most ambitious scientific objectives, however, center on phenomena that scientists cannot directly see.
Dark matter and dark energy are believed together to account for roughly 95% of the universe, yet their fundamental nature remains unknown.
Dark matter is thought to provide a form of gravitational structure or “glue” that helps hold galaxies and other large-scale structures together.
Dark energy, by contrast, is believed to act as a repulsive influence responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe.
Roman’s infrared instruments will allow it to detect light that began traveling toward Earth billions of years ago.
Because looking across immense cosmic distances also means looking backward in time, those observations will allow scientists to examine earlier stages in the universe’s history and compare how matter and cosmic expansion changed across billions of years.
Researchers hope those measurements will provide new clues about both dark matter and dark energy.
Roman will conduct that work alongside other major survey projects, including the Rubin Observatory in Chile and the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft.
Together, those observatories are expected to provide scientists with increasingly precise measurements of the structure and evolution of the universe.
Roman’s findings could also test whether some of the fundamental assumptions used in modern cosmology remain accurate.
Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, said recent astronomical observations have raised questions about whether existing models fully explain the universe’s early expansion.
“Recent observations hint that our standard model of the universe is incorrect,” McEnery said during a Saturday press conference.
Roman is expected to provide data precise enough to determine whether those discrepancies can be reconciled with the current model or point toward a more fundamental problem.
“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.”
The telescope’s enormous observing capability will also create an equally enormous data challenge.
Scientists and members of the public are expected to have access to Roman’s observations rather than the information being restricted to individual research teams.
The telescope is projected to produce approximately 1.3 terabytes of data every day.
That volume is vastly larger than the amount of astronomical information researchers could practically handle through traditional methods.
Content said Roman will create so much information “which means you basically can’t download the data to anybody’s laptop.”
Its extensive surveys are expected to produce vast collections of galaxies, stars, planets, supernovae and other objects that can be analyzed by researchers around the world.
NASA scientists also expect the telescope to uncover phenomena that were not part of its original scientific objectives.
Large astronomical surveys have historically generated discoveries precisely because they expose researchers to objects and events they did not know to search for beforehand.
For McEnery, that possibility is one of Roman’s most important scientific promises.
“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.”
Following Sunday’s successful launch, Roman will begin its roughly 100-day journey to its operating location before embarking on the multi-year survey that NASA hopes will produce an unprecedented panoramic record of the cosmos.
Its mission will combine several of modern astronomy’s largest objectives: determining how common planetary systems like Earth’s may be, cataloging immense numbers of distant objects, tracing billions of years of cosmic history and testing theories about the invisible components believed to dominate the universe.
And while scientists have identified specific questions Roman is designed to answer, the mission’s largest discoveries may ultimately come from questions researchers have not yet thought to ask.
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