Published : 30 Aug 2026, 11:32 PM
Updated : 08 Sep 2026, 09:37 AM
NASA has launched the most wide-eyed space telescope ever built, sending it on a million-mile journey to probe dark matter, distant planets, and the accelerating expansion of the universe -- a mission the White House twice tried to cancel.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, riding a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket toward a gravitational sweet spot roughly 1.6 million kilometres from Earth.
Named after NASA's first chief of astronomy, who died in 2018, Roman carries a 300-megapixel infrared camera that matches the sharpness of the Hubble telescope while sweeping a field of view at least 100 times wider.
A specialised instrument called a coronagraph suppresses starlight, making it far easier to photograph orbiting planets in detail, reports The Guardian.
Roman will park at the same stable gravitational orbit currently occupied by the James Webb Space Telescope.
NASA expects first images in early 2027, after months of calibration -- and plans to make them immediately public.
The telescope's origins lie in a discovery that rattled physics: the universe is not just expanding, but accelerating outward, with no consensus on why.
"It's like throwing a ball in the air and instead of it coming back down, it just keeps shooting away," said Julie McEnery, NASA's senior project scientist.
"There's something really fundamental that we don't understand about the nature of our universe, and Roman is purpose-built to address these questions."
Rather than replacing Hubble and Webb, Roman is designed to work alongside them -- sweeping wide areas to flag interesting targets, while its stablemates zoom in for detail.
The $4.3 billion project twice survived proposals to eliminate it.
Congress blocked the 2025 cuts in January, restoring Nasa's 2026 funding to $24.4 billion.
The Trump administration has since pushed a fresh 23 percent cut to NASA's overall budget for 2027, with science programmes facing a 46 percent reduction -- moves the Planetary Society says could kill more than 50 active missions.
Sunday's launch also marked the final flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, which the company is retiring to focus on Starship, its next-generation rocket intended for future missions to Mars.
