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NASA just launched a camera that can shoot in one frame. What Hubble needs a hundred frames to cover? On Sunday morning, a SpaceX Falcon, heavy, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, carrying the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Its main mirror is exactly the same width as Hubble's 2.4 meters. It was a spare handed to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office. The difference is what sits behind that mirror. Roman's Wide Field Instrument is a 300 megapixel infrared camera built from 18 detectors, each about the size of a cracker. It delivers Hubble-sharp images across a patch of sky 100 times larger, which lets it survey the universe roughly a thousand times faster. That means around 1.4 terabytes of data coming down every single day, the highest of any NASA astrophysics mission. So what is it actually hunting? Dark energy first. Roman will map billions of galaxies over more than 5,000 square degrees to work out why the universe is expanding faster and faster. Then planets. By staring at the crowded galactic bulge and catching tiny gravitational flickers, it should turn up more than a thousand worlds on wide orbits and over 100,000 transiting planets. It can pick out objects only a few times the mass of our moon, including rogue planets drifting through the galaxy with no star at all. There is also a coronagraph on board, a star-like blocker, sharp enough to photograph Jupiter-sized planets directly. Roman is now on a three-month cruise to the second Lagrange point, about a million miles out, where it will be calibrated and tested. First images are expected in early 2027. Then the five-year survey begins.

NASA just launched a camera that can shoot in one frame. What Hubble needs a hundred frames to cover? On Sunday morning, a SpaceX Falcon, heavy, lifted off fro…