[Reuters] NASA began a new mission to probe some of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology with the launch on Sunday of the U.S. space agency's new flagship astronomical observatory, a repurposed spy satellite that will capture panoramic views of the cosmos.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a roughly $4 billion project, was carried aloft from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX (SPCX.O) Falcon Heavy rocket through blue skies just after sunrise. Its mission is planned for five years, though NASA said the telescope may have enough fuel for five additional years.
The telescope, which will park itself in orbit beyond the moon, is designed to investigate cosmic enigmas such as dark energy and dark matter, while also testing gravity at vast scales and searching for exoplanets, as planets beyond our solar system are called.
Sunday's launch marked "an endpoint for the engineers, but it's a starting point for the scientists," Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, told reporters at a post-launch news conference. "It feels like I'm on the edge of a precipice, and we're just about to set a foot off into the unknown."
The observatory was originally designed for a spy satellite program under the National Reconnaissance Office, a part of the U.S. intelligence community that manages the most powerful American spy satellites. That program was over budget and terminated, and the NRO in 2012 donated it to NASA, which repurposed it for cosmic exploration.
Roman will travel through space toward an orbital location called Lagrange Point 2 about a million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth.
Mission scientists will spend the next 90 days commissioning it and preparing for its science operations. Roman is expected to beam back its first high-resolution images "before the winter holidays," Roman telescope project manager Jackie Townsend said.
Roman will build on the capabilities of other orbiting observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, and the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990.
McEnery has said that Roman possesses broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as Hubble, but will survey the cosmos more quickly. Roman can survey our entire Milky Way galaxy in a month while Hubble would need a century, according to McEnery.
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