NASA launches Roman telescope to map the universe at scale

NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, beginning a multiyear mission built to survey the sky far more broadly than earlier space observatories. Roman’s advantage is not simply seeing farther: its infrared camera can capture huge areas of the sky efficiently, allowing scientists to compare billions of galaxies and track how the universe has changed over time. Those measurements could sharpen ideas about dark matter, the unseen mass that shapes galaxies through gravity, and dark energy, the still-unexplained force associated with the universe’s accelerating expansion. Roman will also search for planets around other stars, making it both a cosmic census-taker and a new tool for studying worlds beyond our solar system.