NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launches to Find Exoplanets and Unravel Mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy

How will the cosmos change over time—and meet its eventual end? NASA has just launched a massive observatory to help answer these questions and more in the coming years. On August 30 at 7:26 a.m.

Eastern time, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. It will spend the next five years mapping the universe and studying its expansion by keeping tabs on nearby galaxies and our own Milky Way, as well as hunting for exoplanets, stars, black holes and other celestial objects. The new telescope was named after NASA’s first chief of astronomy and female executive, Nancy Grace Roman, who died in 2018.

She is often considered the “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope” because of her work advocating for space-based astronomical instruments in the 1960s and beyond. Now, after 16 years of planning and development, the Roman Space Telescope is an 18,000-pound observatory that’s around 42 feet long by 14 feet wide, or roughly the size of a tour bus. Its primary goal is to complete three surveys that will help address questions about exoplanets and the evolution and structure of the universe, designed with input from the global scientific community.

For the main survey, Roman will map about one-eighth of the entire sky and capture data on more than one billion galaxies, enabling researchers to look at how these and other structures have grown and evolved. It’ll also measure how the universe has expanded over time, which will help reveal secrets of dark matter, invisible stuff that acts like cosmic glue, and dark energy, the force suspected of driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. These observations are especially exciting now, because in the past decade, astrophysicists have started to suspect flaws in the standard model of cosmology, a theoretical framework that describes the universe and its evolution, McEnery said.

With Roman data, “we’re very likely to demonstrate that our standard model is wrong, and to set ourselves on a path to figuring out how does our universe really work.” Roman will keep an eye on objects for this survey over about 17 months, intermittently, using its Wide Field Instrument. It’s a 300-megapixel camera that sees in infrared light with the same sensitivity and sharpness as Hubble—but with a field of view at least 100 times larger. It can also observe the sky about 1,000 times faster than the 36-year-old telescope can.

For comparison, McEnery said, “one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble.” Another survey, which will take about six months, will examine stellar explosions—supernovas—and other brightness-changing events in our Milky Way. These targets will help measure how the universe expanded in the past. And the third survey, slated to take roughly 15 months, will examine the clump of stars at our galaxy’s core to search for possible exoplanets.