By Joey Roulette and Will Dunham
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, Aug 30 (Reuters) - NASA began a new mission to probe some of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology with the launch on Sunday of the U.S. space agency's new flagship astronomical observatory, a repurposed spy satellite that will capture panoramic views of the cosmos.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a roughly $4 billion project, was carried aloft from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX
Falcon Heavy rocket through blue skies just after sunrise. Its mission is planned for five years, though NASA said the telescope may have enough fuel for five additional years.
The telescope, which will park itself in orbit beyond the moon, is designed to investigate cosmic enigmas such as dark energy and dark matter, while also testing gravity at vast scales and searching for exoplanets, as planets beyond our solar system are called.
Sunday's launch marked "an endpoint for the engineers, but it's a starting point for the scientists," Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, told reporters at a post-launch news conference. "It feels like I'm on the edge of a precipice, and we're just about to set a foot off into the unknown."
The observatory was originally designed for a spy satellite program under the National Reconnaissance Office, a part of the U.S. intelligence community that manages the most powerful American spy satellites. That program was over budget and terminated, and the NRO in 2012 donated it to NASA, which repurposed it for cosmic exploration.
Roman will travel through space toward an orbital location called Lagrange Point 2 about a million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth.
Mission scientists will spend the next 90 days commissioning it and preparing for its science operations. Roman is expected to beam back its first high-resolution images "before the winter holidays," Roman telescope project manager Jackie Townsend said.
'A HOUSEHOLD NAME'
Roman will build on the capabilities of other orbiting observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, and the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990.
"I have no doubt that Roman will become a household name alongside those great instruments of discovery," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters.
McEnery has said that Roman possesses broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as Hubble, but will survey the cosmos more quickly. Roman can survey our entire Milky Way galaxy in a month while Hubble would need a century, according to McEnery.
During Sunday's news conference, Isaacman took a call from President Donald Trump and put the phone speaker up to his microphone. Trump said the launch "looked beautiful on television."
"You are doing a fantastic job, and I'm supplying you all that money," Trump said, referring to NASA's approximately $24 billion 2026 budget, which survived an earlier White House proposal to cut the agency's funding by about $6 billion.
Trump's administration tried during both his first and second terms as president to cancel Roman or reduce its funding, but Congress preserved it. Its launch came nine months ahead of schedule, according to NASA.
'EXQUISITE SENSITIVITY'
Webb has provided a new understanding of the universe's early history, finding among other things that primordial galaxies formed sooner and were bigger than previously known. Webb can look across vast distances and back into deep time, because of the time it takes light to travel.
Roman instead is able to take panoramic views. NASA likens Roman to a camera's wide-angle lens and Webb to a zoom lens.
"Webb is designed to be able to probe very deeply and with exquisite sensitivity into the universe, so we can find rare things in the early universe," McEnery told an earlier briefing, while Roman offers "the large vision that complements the deep views that Webb provides."
Roman will help in the understanding of two mysterious cosmic components — dark energy and dark matter — by creating the most comprehensive 3D map of the universe to date. Its main survey, to take more than a year to complete, will cover more than two billion galaxies.
The Big Bang event roughly 13.8 billion years ago initiated the universe, and it has been expanding ever since. This expansion is accelerating, with an invisible force called dark energy as the hypothesized reason.
The universe's contents include ordinary matter — stars, planets, gas, dust and all the familiar stuff on Earth — as well as dark matter and dark energy. Ordinary matter represents perhaps 5% of the contents. Dark matter, known through its gravitational influences on galaxies and stars, may represent about 27%. Dark energy may represent about 68%.
Using Roman to gauge dark matter's pull and dark energy's push across the universe will bring scientists closer than ever before to solving both mysteries, according to NASA.
Roman also will conduct one of the most comprehensive searches ever for exoplanets. It is expected to discover thousands of new ones and provide the first statistical census of planetary systems similar to our own.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Will Dunham in Washington; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Ros Russell)
