NASA launches powerful new Roman Space Telescope

NASA's new flagship astronomical observatory was launched into space from Florida on Sunday on a mission to probe some of the biggest ​mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a roughly $4 billion project, was carried aloft from NASA's Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon ‌Heavy rocket.

The telescope is designed to investigate cosmic enigmas such as dark energy and dark matter, while also testing gravity at vast scales and searching for exoplanets, as planets beyond our solar system are called.

Roman will travel through space toward an orbital location called Lagrange Point 2, situated about a million miles (1.6 million km) ​from Earth. Its mission is planned for five years, though the US space agency said the telescope may have enough fuel for five additional years.

Roman will build on ​the capabilities of other orbiting observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, and the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990.

"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," Nicola Fox, chief of Nasa's Science Mission ​Directorate, told reporters on Saturday.

"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.

McEnery said one month of Roman observations can survey our entire home galaxy.

"One month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," McEnery said.