NASA's Roman Space Telescope Lifts Off to Chart Exoplanets and the Dark Cosmos

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral, carrying a wide-field infrared imager and the first active space-based coronagraph designed to directly image exoplanets. After a 90-day commissioning at the Sun-Earth L2 point, Roman will operate with other major observatories (Hubble, JWST, Euclid, Rubin) to survey huge swaths of the sky and study dark matter and dark energy, while generating an immense data stream (~500 terabytes per year). With a roughly $4 billion price tag, the mission was completed under budget and ahead of schedule, marking a major advance in space astronomy.