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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Three, two, one - ignition and liftoff. Go Falcon Heavy and go Roman Space Telescope.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
That's a successful launch this morning from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida of a SpaceX rocket carrying a new space telescope. The $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to help scientists understand a mysterious force called dark energy that's causing the universe to expand. It'll also discover new planets orbiting distant stars. Science reporter Joe Palca was monitoring the launch and joins us now. Good morning, Joe.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: Morning, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So how did the launch go?
PALCA: Oh, it went just great. There was some suggestion the weather might pose a problem, but it didn't. And as they say in the space game, everything was nominal, which means things are good.
RASCOE: So tell us a little bit about this telescope.
PALCA: Well, it's named for NASA's first chief astronomer, Nancy Grace Roman, who's also known as the Mother of Hubble because of her role in championing the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. And it actually has an interesting origin story. It started life as a spy telescope for the National Reconnaissance Office, but that office decided it didn't need it anymore. And so it gave it to NASA, and NASA outfitted it to do a lot of really interesting things.
RASCOE: Like - so what kinds of interesting things?
PALCA: Well, it can see a broad patch of the sky. And so its vision is just about as sharp as Hubble, but it has a much wider field of view. So it can observe millions of stars at a time. And it can work much faster than Hubble. Roman project scientist Julie McHenry says the plan is for Roman to spend a month surveying the stars in the Milky Way.
JULIE MCHENRY: So that one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble.
RASCOE: That's a lot of stars. Is it going to be looking for anything specifically?
PALCA: Well, there hasn't been a good image of the far side of the Milky Way, so it'll be picking up some stars' light from there. It can also see these exploding stars called Type Ia supernovas, and these are a special kind of star. They're called standard candles by astronomers, and they - they're used to understand a mysterious force in the universe called dark energy. And dark energy is this thing that seems to making the universe expand, but we don't fully understand how it works yet. Astronomers need more of these supernovae, these standard candles, to figure out basically how that's happening. And the Roman telescope should help them do that.
It's also going to find planets using a technique called gravitational microlensing, planets that you can't see any other way. And another goal is to actually use a camera to take an image of a planet orbiting a distant star. Roman scientist Vanessa Bailey says this is extremely difficult.
VANESSA BAILEY: It's like trying to see a firefly next to a lighthouse hundreds of miles away. We can use a technology called a coronagraph inside of our camera to block that lighthouse and see the firefly.
PALCA: Or, in this case, see the planet orbiting its nearby star.
RASCOE: I mean, that sounds amazing. When are we going to get these images?
PALCA: Well, it's going to take a while. The telescope has to cruise about a million miles from Earth to the Lagrange point, which is a spot it can park safely while it carries out its five-year mission. And it's going to spend the next 45 days checking out instruments, and then the 45 days after that checking out the telescope, and then the pictures should start to come in.
RASCOE: That's Joe Palca. Thank you so much.
PALCA: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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