NASA's Roman Telescope Launches to Probe Dark Universe

NASA's $3.2 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on a Falcon Heavy to survey the dark universe and hunt for Earth-like exoplanets.

NASA launched its latest multibillion-dollar telescope Sunday morning from Florida's Space Coast, sending the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope aloft on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Aviation Week describes the mission as opening a new chapter in exploring the structure and evolution of the universe, calling Roman NASA's sixth flagship space observatory. The telescope is named for NASA's first chief astronomer, the woman who championed the Hubble telescope. Teams including personnel from Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked for more than a decade to develop the $3.2 billion observatory, which joins the Hubble and James Webb telescopes in NASA's flagship astrophysics class.

According to the Arizona Daily Sun, Roman will view the heavens in the same crisp detail as Hubble but can survey an area of sky in one year that would take Hubble 1,000 years. That survey power is what makes its dark-universe goals feasible: the telescope will map how dark matter bends light from hundreds of millions of galaxies, measuring small-scale clumping for the first time, and will test whether dark energy's strength is constant or actually decreasing — a finding that could reshape Einstein's general relativity. Aviation Week notes the observatory will also test technology for imaging planets directly beyond the Solar System.

Since the 1990s, scientists have catalogued more than 6,300 worlds orbiting stars other than our sun, mostly found indirectly by how they wobble, dim, or warp the light of their host stars — methods that favor giant and close-orbiting planets unlike Earth. Roman aims to find 100,000 more exoplanets and will also try to observe some planets directly, measuring light that traveled from a planet's atmosphere. Earth-like planets can be more than a billion times dimmer than their host stars, so Roman carries a coronagraph that focuses starlight into an easy-to-cover pinprick using over 3,000 pistons distorting two flexible mirrors with near atomic-scale precision. JPL instrument scientist Vanessa Bailey told the Arizona Daily Sun that more than 2,000 people contributed to the coronagraph alone.

Roman will run exploratory laps around its 36-year-old observatory body before beginning a five-year mission whose data barrage would fill the storage of about 40,000 laptops, according to JPL research scientist Dida Markovic, a deputy principal investigator on one of the data-analysis teams. If Roman succeeds, it puts scientists one step closer to a future Habitable Worlds Observatory that searches for Earth twins — and potentially one step closer to finding our cosmic neighbors. Its dark-energy measurements could also settle whether the universe keeps expanding toward near-nothingness or, if dark energy weakens, whether dark matter takes the edge and eventually sends the universe collapsing in on itself.