Rabat – NASA launched the Roman Space Telescope on Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, beginning a multi-year mission to map vast areas of the cosmos and investigate some of astronomy’s biggest unanswered questions.
The telescope lifted off at 7:26 a.m. local time (11:26 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, according to the agency’s live broadcast.
Developed over more than a decade at a cost exceeding $4 billion, Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, a pioneering American astronomer known as the “mother of Hubble.”
A wider view of the cosmos
Roman will survey enormous areas of the sky from a point about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, which it is expected to reach after around 100 days.
Its field of view is more than 100 times wider than Hubble’s and significantly broader than that of the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA expects the mission to identify thousands of exoplanets and tens of thousands of supernovae.
“It will be the largest catalog of astronomical objects ever created,” Dave Content, the telescope’s technical lead, told AFP, adding that it could help scientists determine how common solar systems like ours are.
Roman will complement observations from James Webb, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, and the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission.
Testing our understanding of the universe
The telescope will also investigate dark matter and dark energy, which scientists believe account for roughly 95% of the universe but whose nature remains unknown.
Its infrared instruments will allow researchers to study light that traveled for billions of years, offering a clearer picture of how the universe evolved.
Roman’s observations could also put the standard model of cosmology to a major test. Recent findings suggest that the universe’s early expansion may not have followed current predictions.
Julie McEnery, the astrophysicist responsible for the mission, said Roman could determine whether the existing model holds up. If it does not, its data could help scientists narrow down possible explanations.
NASA plans to make Roman’s data available to researchers and the public worldwide. The volume will be enormous, with daily data output far beyond what a typical laptop could handle.
McEnery expects some of the mission’s most important discoveries to come as surprises, findings that scientists could not have predicted and that may open the door to entirely new questions about the universe.
