On the morning of August 30 (Eastern Daylight Time), SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket roared to life from the Kennedy Space Center, propelling NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into the cosmos. Roughly 31 minutes after liftoff, the telescope detached from the rocket’s upper stage and is now en route to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, a journey expected to take approximately 100 days.

As NASA’s next-generation flagship observatory, the Roman Space Telescope boasts a 2.4-meter primary mirror and a 300-megapixel wide-field infrared camera, delivering a field of view 100 times broader than that of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. Its cutting-edge instruments, spanning the near-infrared spectrum, include a coronagraph designed to pioneer exoplanet-hunting techniques. Over its five-year mission, the telescope will embark on three sweeping sky surveys to unravel cosmic enigmas like dark energy and dark matter.

The road to launch spanned 16 years. Initially dubbed WFIRST, the project’s budget swelled from $1.6 billion to $4.3 billion, weathering multiple threats of cancellation. Persistent congressional support, however, kept the mission on track. This milestone marks the Falcon Heavy rocket’s 13th flight and its third major NASA launch, cementing its reputation as a workhorse of the space agency’s fleet.