The National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched a new flagship telescope, a powerful observatory device that will study so-called dark matter and hunt for other planets.
A SpaceX rocket took off with the device, called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, just before 7:30 a.m. ET Sunday from a launchpad in Florida. The launch went smoothly, setting up the telescope to fly out to an orbit about one million miles from the planet.
During the course of a mission designed to last at least five years, the observatory will take sweeping surveys of the cosmos. The telescope's main scientific sensor is essentially a giant, infrared camera dubbed the Wide Field Instrument.
The WFI camera has 300 megapixels, giving it a much bigger field of view than NASA's Hubble observatory, according to the agency, and will gather data much faster than that device. The camera should allow the telescope to capture extremely high-resolution images in space.
"It's the instrument that allows us the panoramic imagery that make Roman so iconic," Dominic Benford, a NASA scientist working on the telescope program, said Sunday during a NASA livestream of the launch.
The telescope also includes what is called a coronagraph, a system that includes mirrors and optical sensors to try to image other planets.
It will study dark matter, a mysterious form of matter that scientists believe will help them understand the nature of the universe. The telescope will also track hundreds of millions of stars, searching for light that could indicate the presence of so-called exoplanets.
Named after a pioneering female astronomer at NASA, the telescope nearly didn't get to space. President Trump proposed canceling the device in budget pitches, but Congress continued to support funding the device and having it launched.
NASA has said the total cost of the device, including development and operations, is expected to be roughly $4.3 billion.
The telescope uses mirror technology originally developed for the National Reconnaissance Office, a U.S. intelligence agency that operates powerful spy satellites that monitor Earth. The NRO donated the gear to NASA more than a decade ago, allowing teams at NASA to repurpose the technology.
SpaceX launched the device using a Falcon Heavy rocket, a more powerful variant of its workhorse Falcon 9 vehicle. The telescope weighs about 18,000 pounds, and measures more than 42 feet long and over 14 feet wide.
