Nasa launched its new flagship space telescope on Sunday, embarking on a multi-year mission to create an unprecedented map of the cosmos and shed light on some of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Designed to take a panoramic view of the vast reaches of space, the Roman Space Telescope "will help unlock the secrets of the universe," US President Donald Trump said on Friday during a ceremony at Nasa headquarters in Houston, Texas.

Standing over 12 metres tall, the state-of-the-art observatory launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26pm Hong Kong time aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Developed over more than a decade at a cost topping US$4 billion, the telescope is named after pioneering US astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who became known as the "Mother of Hubble," another of Nasa's flagship telescopes.

While Hubble revealed that the universe is expanding faster than previously thought, Roman will seek to answer some of the other unsolved mysteries, including those of dark matter and dark energy.

"Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe," Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman said in April when he unveiled the project to the press.

With a field of view more than 100 times larger than Hubble's – and significantly wider than James Webb's – Roman will survey vast swaths of the sky from a vantage point 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, which it will take about 100 days to reach.

Designed to work in tandem with other observatories such as Webb, which offers greater power and precision, Roman aims to discover thousands of exoplanets as well as tens of thousands of supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars.

"It will be the biggest catalogue of astronomical objects anybody's ever produced, and it will help us understand how common are solar systems like our own," Dave Content, Roman's technical manager, said.

The new telescope will also shed light on two of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark matter and dark energy. Their origins remain unknown, but together they are believed to make up about 95 percent of the universe.

Dark matter is thought to act as a kind of gravitational glue, while dark energy is believed to be a repulsive force driving the universe's expansion.

With its infrared vision, Roman will be able to detect light emitted by celestial objects billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time and offering scientists a glimpse into the universe's distant past and helping them better understand these two mysterious phenomena. (AFP)


Edited by Aaron Tam