NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches on $4.3 billion mission to map the cosmos

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off Sunday at 7:26 a.m. ET from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, per NBC News reporting, beginning its journey to observe dark matter, dark energy, and tens of thousands of exoplanets. The observatory reached the speed of sound within one minute and reached space in just under five minutes, ascending to 62 miles above sea level. Both side core boosters separated from the core shortly after and successfully returned to Florida for recovery. After 31 minutes and 41 seconds, the telescope successfully separated from the rocket and began flying free toward an orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, a gravitational balance spot approximately 1 million miles from Earth where it will spend over three months traveling to reach its final destination, per NBC News reporting. The $4.3 billion mission, reported by NBC News as being under development for nearly two decades, is set to launch nine months ahead of schedule. Once operational, the Roman telescope will survey the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble, with each image capturing a patch of sky at least 100 times larger than one of Hubble's, per NBC News. The telescope holds a 300-megapixel wide-field camera and an experimental, eclipse-creating coronagraph that will allow it to directly image planets orbiting masked stars. The primary mirror, at nearly 8 feet in diameter, is the same size as Hubble's but is actually spy satellite surplus, donated by the National Reconnaissance Office to NASA more than a decade ago for repurposing, per Washington Examiner reporting. Over the course of its five-year mission, the telescope is expected to capture panoramic views of the cosmos and conduct three primary surveys, according to NBC News reporting. During the largest survey, lasting over a year, the telescope will peer through the Milky Way's dense, star-packed center, known as the galactic bulge, building a vast catalog of all the astronomical objects it observes. The second and third surveys will focus on dark matter, the invisible material thought to make up most of the matter in galaxies and inferred by the gravitational effects it exerts, and dark energy, the mysterious force scientists think is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate, per NBC News. Expectations for discoveries are expansive. NBC News reports the telescope is expected to uncover more than 100,000 planets around other stars, capture tens of thousands of supernovae blasts, detect countless transient events like flares generated by stars torn apart by close encounters with black holes, catalog approximately 20 billion stars, and identify 2 billion or more individual galaxies. By comparison, some 6,200 exoplanets have been discovered to date, per CBS News reporting, and by the end of Roman's mission, the exoplanet count is expected to climb well above 100,000. NASA science mission director Nicky Fox said, per Washington Examiner reporting: "It's going to find thousands of supernovae, tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies and tens of billions of stars." Senior project scientist Julie McEnery said, per Washington Examiner: "A month of Milky Way observations by Roman would take Hubble a century to complete." The telescope will work in concert with other observatories. Roman will collaborate with the European Space Agency's Euclid spacecraft and the National Science Foundation's Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, per Washington Examiner reporting. The James Webb Space Telescope is stationed in the same L2 region as Roman's destination, per CBS News reporting. The mission carries symbolic weight beyond its scientific reach. Nancy Grace Roman became NASA's first chief of astronomy in 1959 and is considered a pioneer of modern space-based astronomy, per NBC News reporting. She was instrumental in winning congressional approval for the Hubble Space Telescope, earning her the nickname "Mother of Hubble," according to Washington Examiner reporting. Roman died in 2018 at age 93. NASA named its newest space telescope after her in 2020, two years after her death, per NBC News. Roman is NASA's first space telescope to be named after a woman, per Washington Examiner reporting. President Trump's administration attempted to reduce funding for Roman in earlier rounds of proposed budget cuts, per CBS News reporting. On Sunday, President Trump called NASA chief Jared Isaacman during a post-launch news conference at the Florida spaceport.