NASA's most ambitious new eye in the sky lifted off on Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, beginning a multi-year mission to chart vast swaths of the cosmos and probe some of the deepest mysteries in modern physics. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket — one of the most powerful in operation — carried the $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into space shortly after daybreak, with the telescope successfully separating from the rocket's upper stage roughly half an hour after launch. It will take approximately three months to reach its operational position: the second Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable location some 1.5 million kilometres from Earth that is also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

Named after Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018), the first woman to hold a senior position at NASA and a driving force behind the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope — earning her the nickname "Mother of Hubble" — the new observatory is the first NASA space telescope to bear a woman's name. Roman's primary instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera with a field of view more than 100 times wider than Hubble's, yet matching Hubble's sharpness. The result is extraordinary speed: what Roman can observe in a single month would take Hubble a century to complete. Scientists expect it to catalogue billions of galaxies, tens of billions of stars, thousands of supernovae, and hundreds of thousands of exoplanets — worlds orbiting stars beyond our own Sun, of which only around 6,000 have been discovered to date. Roman also carries an experimental coronagraph capable of blocking out starlight to directly image faint planets orbiting nearby stars.

Among the telescope's most significant scientific goals is shedding light on dark matter and dark energy — invisible phenomena that together are estimated to account for roughly 95 percent of the universe. Dark matter is thought to act as a gravitational scaffold holding cosmic structures together, while dark energy is believed to be a repulsive force accelerating the universe's expansion since the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. By surveying enormous numbers of galaxies, Roman will help scientists measure the rate of that expansion with unprecedented precision, potentially challenging or confirming current models of the universe's structure.

Roman is designed to work in concert with existing observatories rather than replace them. Webb, with its narrower but extraordinarily powerful gaze, will follow up on unusual objects that Roman identifies. The European Space Agency's Euclid spacecraft and the ground-based Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will further complement Roman's all-sky surveys. The first images from Roman are expected in early 2026. The telescope, which launched nearly a year ahead of schedule and within budget, is also designed to be refuellable, opening the possibility of extending its operational life beyond its planned five-year mission if robotic servicing technology becomes available.

"Roman's vast reach will allow us to find the weird, the rare and the unusual," said senior project scientist Julie McEnery. NASA science mission director Nicky Fox, visibly emotional at launch, described the telescope's ambitions simply: "It's going to be able to do things that we've never been able to do before." Among the longest-term aspirations is laying the groundwork for future observatories that might one day answer what NASA regards as the most profound question of all — whether life, and perhaps another Earth, exists somewhere else in the universe.