Roman Space Telescope set for NASA launch Sunday

NASA is preparing to launch the Roman Space Telescope from Florida on Sunday at 7:26 a.m. (1126 GMT), starting a multi-year mission to map large areas of the universe.

The 12-meter observatory is scheduled to fly on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. NASA says it will take about 100 days to reach a vantage point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

The telescope, named after US astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, was developed over more than a decade at a cost of more than $4 billion. NASA says its field of view is more than 100 times larger than Hubble's and wider than the James Webb Space Telescope's.

Roman is designed to search for thousands of exoplanets and tens of thousands of supernovae, while helping scientists study dark matter and dark energy. Those phenomena are believed to make up about 95 percent of the universe, though their origins remain unknown.

Roman technical manager Dave Content said the mission could produce the largest catalogue of astronomical objects ever made. NASA officials said the telescope is expected to generate about 1.3 terabytes of data a day, with all data available to scientists and the public.