NASA successfully launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, sending the spacecraft into orbit from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX rocket. A post-launch press conference followed shortly after liftoff.
The Roman Space Telescope is designed to study some of the deepest questions in astrophysics, including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which together make up the vast majority of the universe but remain poorly understood. NASA has described the observatory as one of its next generation of great observatories, a designation previously held by telescopes such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope.
According to Space.com, the launch was followed by a NASA and SpaceX press conference to discuss the mission's initial status. President Trump dialed into the NASA news conference, according to Ars Technica, in an unusual appearance at a post-launch event.
The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy, who played a central role in the early development of the Hubble Space Telescope program. The Roman telescope will survey large sections of the sky, giving it a much wider field of view than the James Webb telescope, which looks at smaller areas in greater detail.
