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Updated on: August 30, 2026 / 8:22 AM EDT
/ CBS News
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NASA's $4.3 billion Roman Space Telescope was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket Sunday, kicking off a three-month voyage to a point in space a million miles from Earth where it will map the large-scale structure of the cosmos with a wide-field 300-megapixel camera.Using a Hubble-class mirror originally built for a spy satellite, Roman will search for clues about the nature of repulsive dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe, along with probing the distribution of equally mysterious dark matter, which holds galaxies together and accounts for most of its mass.A second instrument, an experimental coronagraph with shape-shifting mirrors that can dim the glare of distant suns, will allow astronomers to analyze the light reflected from vastly dimmer Jupiter-size planets to tease out details about their chemical makeup.
