A telescope named for Hubble's mother is now flying

NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on August 30 at 7:26 a.m. Eastern, sending the 18,000-pound observatory up on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roughly the size of a tour bus, it will spend at least five years mapping the universe, tracking its expansion and hunting for exoplanets. Its main survey alone will capture data on more than a billion galaxies. The telescope carries a 300-megapixel infrared camera as sharp as Hubble but with a field of view at least 100 times larger. One month of Milky Way observations, senior project scientist Julie McEnery said, would take Hubble about a century. The instrument is named for NASA's first chief of astronomy, who died in 2018 and is often called the mother of the Hubble telescope. First images are expected in December. "It could be around Christmas," program scientist Dominic Benford told NBC News, "so hopefully that's a nice present."