Nancy Grace Roman telescope launches: a field of view 100 times Hubble's, hunting dark energy

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT on a Falcon Heavy from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. It will take about 90 days to reach the Sun–Earth L2 point, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

Roman's field of view is about 100 times wider than Hubble's and it is designed to survey the sky about 1,000 times faster. It will return 1.4 terabytes of data a day, more than any NASA astrophysics mission. It took more than a decade to build and cost about $4 billion.

What it will look for

The telescope is to measure how the expansion of the universe has changed over time, map dark matter and find thousands of exoplanets through gravitational microlensing. "Roman will give us a new atlas of the universe," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.