1,000 times faster than Hubble: NASA launches a new telescope to explore the "hidden universe"
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, described by the agency as a "discovery machine," is set to launch from Florida. The $4.3 billion project aims to explore dark energy and dark matter.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which the agency calls a "discovery machine," is scheduled to launch at noon from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The telescope, estimated to cost $4.3 billion and developed over a decade, is designed to detect objects with a faint light signature that are invisible in space, and to provide astronomers with a new tool for exploring the universe beyond the capabilities of the Hubble and James Webb telescopes.
"The Roman telescope will give Earth a new atlas of the universe," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at the unveiling ceremony of the completed telescope, held in April at the Goddard Center in Maryland.
The telescope's scanning capabilities are 1,000 times faster than those of Hubble, and its field of view is 100 times wider — data that, according to NASA scientists, will allow it to discover billions of galaxies, thousands of exploding stars (supernovae), and tens of billions of stars during its five years of operation, and even locate tens of thousands of new planets, including "rogue planets" that do not orbit a star at all.
The telescope's primary mission is to help solve two of the greatest mysteries of physics: dark energy, the mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, and dark matter, which makes up about 85% of the total matter in the universe but has never been directly detected. Roman will use supernovae as "cosmic candles" to measure dark energy, and map how light is bent by gravity to build a 3D map of dark matter in the universe.
After launch, it will take the telescope about three months to reach its location in orbit, about a million miles (about 1.6 million km) from Earth, where it will undergo commissioning and testing. In its routine operation, Roman is expected to transmit one terabyte of data per day to Earth — an amount that NASA scientists compare to transmitting a million songs from a million miles away all at once. All data will be released to the public immediately upon processing, and the first images from the telescope are expected to be published in January 2027.
The telescope is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, the first chief of NASA's astronomy division in the 1960s, who was known as the "mother of the Hubble telescope." In addition to the wide-field scanning tool, Roman also carries an experimental coronagraph — an instrument that blocks starlight to reveal planets in their vicinity — which is up to 1,000 times better than any similar device built to date, and according to NASA scientists, may pave the way for a future follow-up mission, the "Habitable Worlds Observatory," designed to photograph Earth-like planets and detect chemical signs that allow for the existence of life in their atmosphere.
