Roman will operate for many years, and one of the high-performance telescope's goals is to create an atlas of the cosmos by, among other things, taking panoramic images of the sky.
Ahead of the launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, President Donald Trump said Roman “will help unlock the secrets of the universe.” A long-held hope is that the telescope will help explore dark matter.
The telescope, formally named Nancy Grace Roman after an American astronomer, took more than a decade to build, at a cost equivalent to 38 billion kronor.
The launch took place on a SpaceX Falcon rocket.
