CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched from Cape Canaveral at 7:26 a.m. Sunday.
The telescope carries a legacy of space exploration in its name. Nancy Roman, known as the "Mother of Hubble," was NASA's first chief of astronomy and the first female executive at NASA. She pioneered the Hubble and eventually the Webb Telescope. Now her name and legacy lives on with the most powerful telescope ever launched.
Dr. Dominic Benford, a program scientist working on the Roman Telescope, says the difference between the Roman and the Hubble is how much the Roman will actually be able to see.
"We've designed a survey machine with 100 times the field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope, but the same sharpness of imagery, and we can map the universe 10 times more efficiently, which means we can image the cosmos 1000 times more rapidly than has ever been possible before," Benford said.
The Roman Telescope is also expected to capture phenomena never before seen.
"We'll see thousands of new supernovae across cosmic time and see all of those happening because Roman's panoramic vision means that we're not just looking at one galaxy at a time, we're looking at millions of galaxies all the time," Benford said.
The Roman is expected to send data back about a week after launch, with the first images arriving approximately 90 days after that.
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