NASA launches Roman telescope to probe cosmos

What happened

NASA on Sunday launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a $4.3 billion repurposed spy satellite designed to capture panoramic views of the cosmos, cataloguing Earth-like exoplanets and helping solve some of the biggest mysteries of astrophysics: dark matter and dark energy. The bus-sized telescope, named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket en route to an observation point a million miles away.

Who said what

Roman is “NASA’s latest and greatest cosmic cartographer,” The New York Times said. Set to send back a “whopping one terabyte of data each day,” the telescope “promises a panorama so wide and so crisp that it would take more than half a million high-definition TVs to display in full.” While 2021’s James Webb Telescope, like a zoom lens, is designed to “probe very deeply and with exquisite sensitivity ​into the universe,” Roman’s “vast reach will allow us to find the weird, the rare and the unusual,” senior project scientist Julie McEnery said.

The new telescope’s real “superpower is speed,” The Associated Press said. The Hubble Space Telescope, “still churning out celestial glamour shots after 36 years,” could scan the entire Milky Way in a century; Roman can do it in a month.

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What next?

Roman is scheduled to arrive at its L2 orbit point in about 100 days. “Its mission is planned for five years,” Reuters said, “though NASA said the telescope may have enough fuel for five additional years.”