NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has launched on a three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, in a quest to reveal the universe’s darkest secrets.

This flagship mission will help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and worlds outside of the solar system, known as exoplanets. 

The mission launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT on 30 August aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, a statement by the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

Roman pairs a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to explore vast swaths of the sky and probe deeply into cosmic history. The survey is expected to support a broad range of research extending far beyond the mission’s main science goals.

Seven minutes after launch, the ground control team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, began receiving telemetry data from Roman. 

The Falcon Heavy rocket performed as expected, separating from the observatory 31 minutes into the flight. After separating from the centre core, the rocket’s boosters safely returned to the launch site for refurbishment, it stated. 

“...With its large field of view and fast survey speeds, Roman will usher us into a new era of discovery and make the invisible visible, setting the foundation for humanity’s search for life beyond our solar system,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

During launch and early orbit, Roman used the Near Space Network’s ground stations and relay satellites to exchange tracking, telemetry, and command data with ground controllers. About 70 minutes after launch, the Deep Space Network took over communications and guided Roman toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth. 

The Roman team also confirmed successful deployment of the observatory’s solar panels and lower instrument sun shade an hour and 23 minutes after launch. 

Within the upcoming days, Roman’s high-gain antenna and visor-like deployable aperture cover will deploy, ground controllers will initiate the first of two-mid-course corrections, and the Coronagraph Instrument will power on. 

This instrument will demonstrate the technology that future missions like NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory concept could use to image Earth-like planets in the search for life in the universe. 

A few weeks into Roman’s voyage, its primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument, will activate. The 300-megapixel infrared camera has 18 4K detectors, each about the size of a saltine cracker. These detectors collect photons of light that will be decoded into crisp cosmic panoramas. 

The Roman telescope is designed to survey the universe a thousand times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Throughout the rest of Roman’s three-month commissioning period, scientists will run the instruments through a series of calibrations and tests. NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images by early 2027.

Roman will send back 1.4 terabytes of data every day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission, so far. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and citizen scientists will help sift through it and flag significant findings, which astronomers can then study, it said.

“We’ve never been able to view the universe with eyes like Roman’s before,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. “There’s no telling what more we’ll know and have seen by this time next year.”

Roman is the fourth primary mission NASA has launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket.