A new NASA space telescope is on its way to scan vast stretches of the universe, hunt for thousands of planets and probe the mysterious forces shaping the cosmos.
The telescope will take more than three months to reach its destination, the Associated Press reported. NASA launched the $4.3 billion Roman Space Telescope on Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center , sending the bus-sized observatory towards an observation point about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometres) away.
“It’s going to find thousands of supernovae, tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies and tens of billions of stars,” NASA science mission director Nicky Fox said. “It’s going to be able to do things that we’ve never been able to do before with its massive field of view.”
Its field of view is more than 100 times wider than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. It will survey vast areas of space at unprecedented speed, helping scientists study parts of the universe that remain largely unexplored. Named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, the telescope is designed to survey the universe at unprecedented speed. Roman will work alongside Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft and the National Science Foundation’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Once Roman spots new worlds, Webb’s greater power and sensitivity will allow scientists to study them in greater detail.
