Roman Space Telescope launches from Florida

NASA launched the Roman Space Telescope from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, sending the observatory into space on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 am local time, 1126 GMT.

The launch began a multi-year mission to map large areas of the universe and study major questions in physics, including dark matter and dark energy. NASA says the telescope will take about 100 days to reach a vantage point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

The observatory is named after US astronomer Nancy Grace Roman and was developed over more than a decade at a cost of more than $4 billion. NASA says Roman's 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.

Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist, said recent observations suggest the standard model of the universe may be incorrect, and that Roman should provide data precise enough to help test it.