NASA launches $4.3bn Roman Telescope to uncover universe’s hidden secrets

NASA’s newest flagship astronomical observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has been launched on a quest to solve some of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology, including hunting for planets around other stars, exploring dark energy and scanning the cosmos.

SpaceX, the aerospace company run by Elon Musk, launched the $4.3bn space telescope on a triple-the-fire-power Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida just after dawn on Sunday.

The rocket sped towards a location called Lagrange Point 2, where it is to join the Webb Space Telescope in orbit around the sun 1.6 million kilometres (1 million miles) from Earth at NASA’s premier deep-space vantage point. It will take more than three months to get there. Its mission is planned for five years although the United States space agency said the telescope may have enough fuel for five additional years, given that the telescope is designed to be refuelled. If a robotic tanker becomes available in the coming decade, that could extend the Roman Telescope’s life.

The advanced, bus-sized telescope was designed to probe cosmic enigmas while also testing gravity at unprecedented scales and searching for exoplanets, which are planets beyond our solar system. It is expected to discover thousands of new ones and provide the first statistical census of planetary systems similar to our own.

Astronomers expect Roman to shed light on the dark matter and dark energy that make up most of the universe yet remain invisible. The universe’s contents include ordinary matter – stars, planets, gas, dust and all the familiar stuff on Earth – as well as dark matter and dark energy. Ordinary matter represents perhaps 5 percent of the universe’s contents. Dark matter, known through its gravitational influences on galaxies and stars, may represent about 27 percent. Dark energy may represent about 68 percent.

The telescope’s main survey, set to take more than a year to complete, will cover more than 2 billion galaxies. Roman’s catalogue of galaxies will help scientists ascertain how quickly the universe is expanding due to its perplexing and obscure forces.

“It’s going to find thousands of supernovae, tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies and tens of billions of stars,” said the chief of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Nicky Fox. “It’s going to be able to do things that we’ve never been able to do before with its massive field of view.”

Minutes after a thunderous liftoff, the rocket’s twin side boosters plunged tail-first through the atmosphere, piercing the sky with sharp sonic booms as they touched down at Cape Canaveral. Moments later, the telescope cleanly separated from the upper stage of the rocket, triggering an eruption of applause from ground control.

The science mission director was in tears watching the action unfurl.

Launching nearly a year ahead of schedule and within budget, Roman is NASA’s first space telescope to be named after a woman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, the late Nancy Grace Roman.

Retired NASA scientist Ed Weiler said the honour is long overdue. He coined the phrase “Mother of Hubble” for Roman, who hired him in 1978. Observatories above Earth’s obscuring atmosphere can see farther and better, she insisted after joining the brand-new NASA in 1959. She died in 2018 aged 93.

“This is very, very fitting. I think Nancy would be very proud” that the telescope will tackle some of the biggest, lingering questions about the universe, Weiler said.

The cosmic trio – Hubble, Webb and Roman – join forces

Roman’s field of view is more than 100 times wider than that of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which is still spinning starlight into striking celestial glamour shots even after 36 years in orbit.

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, entered the fray more recently with a refined, laser-focused purpose of piercing deep into space to capture cosmic objects nearly as old as the Big Bang itself. Webb has transformed our understanding of the early universe. By looking across vast distances, it has essentially peered back in time due to the speed of light. Its observations have revealed that the earliest galaxies formed much sooner and grew significantly larger than scientists previously thought.

NASA ⁠likens Roman to a camera’s wide-angle lens due to its ability to take panoramic views and Webb to a zoom lens.

“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,” Fox told reporters on Saturday.

The three orbiting powerhouses will join forces – along with the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft and the National Science Foundation’s Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile – for a mission to reveal some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

“Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as Hubble, but we survey the sky much faster,” Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland told reporters at a briefing in July, adding that “one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble.”

Inside the countless galaxies awaiting discovery are stars with planets. Once these new worlds are spotted by Roman, the ultra-sensitive Webb telescope will zero in to analyse their details.

“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”.

US President Donald Trump’s administration tried repeatedly during both his first and second terms to target the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for termination or extreme budget reductions, but Congress intervened each time to protect and preserve its funding.