NASA is expected to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, an observatory that scientists have described as a “discovery machine.”
Roughly the size of a bus, the telescope will be launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
During its five-year mission, Roman will seek answers to some of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos, including dark energy and dark matter. It is also expected to discover galaxies, exoplanets and rogue planets that do not orbit a star.
According to NASA, the telescope will survey the sky more than 1,000 times faster than Hubble, while complementing the work of both Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope.
Following launch, Roman will take approximately three months to reach its orbit, roughly 1.6 million kilometers from Earth. The observatory is expected to transmit around one terabyte of data per day.
The telescope, which took roughly a decade to build, has an estimated cost of $4.3 billion. Scientists expect its capabilities to enable discoveries that cannot currently be predicted.
