NASA’s New Telescope Begins A Million-Mile Hunt For Cosmic Secrets
NASA’s newest flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has launched as scheduled on a mission to map the universe, hunt for distant planets, and unravel the cosmic mysteries of dark energy and dark matter.
The observatory lifted off on August 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roughly 70 minutes after launch, control transitioned to NASA’s Deep Space Network as the spacecraft began its three-month, 930,000-mile (1.5 million km) journey to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), the same gravitationally stable region that currently hosts the JWST. Over its five-year primary mission, Roman will scan vast swaths of space to construct an unprecedented cosmic atlas, measuring light from as many as one billion galaxies to trace how the universe expanded over time.
Equipped with a massive 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument (WFI), the telescope...
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