America just sent a powerful new eye into space.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The observatory is now beginning a roughly three-month, million-mile journey to its operating orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point.

NASA marked the launch with a look at the mission now racing toward deep space:

The launch went exactly the way Americans hope a mission of this scale will go. NASA’s ground team began receiving telemetry seven minutes after liftoff, and Roman separated from the rocket about 31 minutes into the flight.

The Falcon Heavy side boosters also returned safely to the launch site for refurbishment. That is American engineering doing what it does best: pushing forward, landing the hardware, and getting ready to fly again.

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NASA reports that Roman was delivered ahead of schedule and on budget after more than a decade of work by the agency and its industry partners. The spacecraft left Earth with its solar panels and lower instrument sun shade deployed successfully, while ground stations and relay satellites began tracking its speed, position, and health.

NASA says the Deep Space Network then took over communications for the journey to L2, with stations in Australia, Spain, and California maintaining contact. The telescope’s 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument will activate within weeks, followed by months of calibration before the first images are expected in early 2027.

Roman is designed to send back 1.4 terabytes of data every day, the highest data rate yet for a NASA astrophysics mission. That ahead-of-schedule, on-budget result is a major American win at a time when delays and overruns are too often treated as inevitable.

Roman’s reach is hard to overstate. The NASA mission page explains that its field of view is at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, allowing the observatory to scan huge regions of the sky without sacrificing the sharp infrared vision needed to study distant objects.

Those surveys could measure light from about a billion galaxies and help scientists trace how the universe expanded and how its largest structures formed. Roman will also hunt for planets through gravitational microlensing and use a coronagraph to block starlight so researchers can directly examine Jupiter-like exoplanets and planet-forming disks.

The mission is built to answer questions about dark matter and dark energy while creating a broad cosmic map that other observatories can investigate in finer detail. Hubble and Webb can stare deeply at narrow targets; Roman is the discovery machine designed to find more of those targets across a much wider sky.

President Trump called NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman after the launch to congratulate the team. Isaacman shared part of that moment from the post-launch press conference:

The observatory carries the name of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and the woman widely remembered as the “mother of Hubble.” She joined the young space agency in 1959 and spent years making the case for putting major observatories above Earth’s atmosphere.

Roman died in 2018 at age 93, but the telescope bearing her name now carries that vision far beyond Earth. It is also NASA’s first space telescope named for a woman.

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An Associated Press launch-day account places Roman alongside Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, Europe’s Euclid spacecraft, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in a new era of complementary sky surveys.

Roman’s bus-sized observatory cost roughly $4.3 billion and carries a 7.9-foot primary mirror, the same basic mirror diameter as Hubble but paired with a dramatically wider view.

The report says Roman could find thousands of supernovae, tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies, and tens of billions of stars during its planned five-year science mission. Its design also allows for possible robotic refueling if a suitable spacecraft becomes available, creating a path to extend that work well beyond the original mission life.

That combination of wide coverage and fine detail gives scientists a way to spot rare events and distant worlds at a scale no previous space telescope could match. The raw number of discoveries may be staggering, but the real prize is learning what those observations reveal about the structure, history, and future of the universe.

SpaceX confirmed the crucial moment when Roman separated and began flying on its own:

A separate NASA update confirmed that Roman was communicating with mission controllers after separation and beginning its post-launch sequence. The Near Space Network’s South Point and Dongara ground stations received the first signals, while the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System helped maintain contact during the critical opening phase.

Roman’s solar arrays began deploying once the spacecraft was free of the rocket, giving it the power needed for the voyage and the commissioning work ahead. Engineers will continue checking its systems, deploying the high-gain antenna and aperture cover, and making course corrections as it travels roughly one million miles from Earth.

That successful handoff turned years of design, testing, and assembly into a working observatory on its way to deep space. American scientists, engineers, launch crews, and private industry delivered the mission; now the telescope has to prove what it can see.

Roman still has months of travel and commissioning ahead before the science begins. But its first major test is over, the telescope is flying, and America has just opened a much wider window on the universe.

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