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NASA launches $4.3bn Roman Space Telescope to map dark matter and hunt thousands of new planets

Nancy Grace Roman, whose stubborn determination broke barriers in science, is honoured by the $4.3bn infrared telescope launching Sunday to survey billions of galaxies.
Nancy Grace Roman, whose stubborn determination broke barriers in science, is honoured by the $4.3bn infrared telescope launching Sunday to survey billions of galaxies.
Roman's 2.4-metre mirror was repurposed from surplus military spy-satellite hardware originally built to point downward at Earth, not out into the cosmos.
Roman's 2.4-metre mirror was repurposed from surplus military spy-satellite hardware originally built to point downward at Earth, not out into the cosmos.

NASA's Roman Space Telescope lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday morning aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, beginning a mission to survey the universe at a scale never previously attempted. The bus-sized observatory faces a journey of more than three months to travel roughly one million miles to its observation point alongside the Webb Space Telescope. Nicky Fox, NASA science mission director, was in tears at launch as she described how Roman would discover thousands of supernovae, tens of thousands of planets, and billions of galaxies.

Roman's camera covers the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble, gathering in a single month what Hubble took a century to accumulate.

The telescope's field of view is more than 100 times wider than Hubble's, with a single image covering the equivalent of 45 city blocks.

Trump called Roman a tool that 'will help unlock the secrets of the universe' at a ceremony at NASA headquarters on Friday.

MoreDaily MailTense launch for NASA's new ultra-powerful $4.3bn telescopeYahoo News UKNASA's newest space telescope launches on a quest to explore the hidden universeReutersNASA launches powerful new Roman Space Telescope from FloridaSpaceflight NowRoman Space Telescope, NASA’s next ‘great observatory,’ poised for Sunday launch - Spaceflight NowThe New York TimesNASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope Promises a Breakthrough in Cosmic Exploration - The New York Times
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