NASA has launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, its next "great observatory," on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, tasking it with investigating the mysterious forces shaping the Universe, including dark energy and dark matter. The $4.3 billion mission is notable for arriving ahead of schedule and on budget, a rare feat for a major NASA astrophysics project, and it will complement the James Webb Space Telescope by offering a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's.

The observatory is built around a 2.4-metre mirror donated by the National Reconnaissance Office, matching Hubble's mirror size but paired with a new 300-megapixel camera capable of capturing vast swathes of sky in unprecedented detail. Launched on Sunday and weighing around nine tonnes, Roman is heading to an observation post near the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, a journey expected to take about three months before calibration begins and the first science images are released by year's end. The telescope honours Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, who championed the funding and vision behind Hubble before her death in 2018.