NASA launched its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, beginning a multi-year mission to map the cosmos and probe some of the biggest unanswered questions in physics. The observatory lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, with officials, including US President Donald Trump, hailing it as a major step in unlocking the secrets of the universe.

The telescope, over 12 metres tall and developed over more than a decade at a cost exceeding $4 billion, is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, known as the "Mother of Hubble". It boasts a field of view more than 100 times larger than Hubble's, and will settle roughly 930,000 miles from Earth after a journey of about 100 days. Scientists expect it to catalogue thousands of exoplanets and tens of thousands of supernovae, while its infrared vision will help investigate dark matter and dark energy, mysterious phenomena thought to make up around 95% of the universe, working alongside observatories such as James Webb, Rubin and Europe's Euclid probe.