CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off Sunday at 7:26 a.m. aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, eight months ahead of schedule, and is expected to arrive in about three months at an observing post 1 million miles from Earth, where astronomers said much of the universe had not finished getting ready.
The observatory carries a primary mirror 2.4 meters across, the same size as Hubble’s, and a wide-field instrument with roughly 100 times the field of view of Hubble’s infrared camera. It is designed to study dark energy and to search for planets around other stars, and it is expected to measure light from about 1 billion galaxies over the course of its mission. Its first images are expected early next year.
“Imagine you told someone you’d be over in May, and then you showed up in August holding a camera,” said Dr. Ingrid Sollner, an astronomer at the Pelham Ridge Observatory who said she had spent Sunday morning fielding inquiries from the cosmos. “That’s essentially what’s happened. A great many galaxies were planning to straighten up in the spring.”
Observatories on the ground reported signs of hurried preparation across the observable universe within hours of liftoff. Two spiral galaxies in the constellation Virgo were seen tightening their arms. A large elliptical galaxy in the direction of Coma Berenices, which astronomers described as having looked the same for as long as anyone can remember, was observed attempting to look less elliptical. Several thousand galaxies near the edge of the observable universe, which Roman is designed to see in unusual numbers, appeared to be moving away from Earth faster than usual, a behavior Sollner said was consistent with both cosmic expansion and “pretending not to be home.” Dark energy, which has made up roughly two-thirds of the universe without explanation since its discovery was announced in 1998, issued a statement through a representative at Pelham Ridge requesting additional time to prepare an explanation, and asking that Roman not look directly at it before then.
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the universe had been given ample notice. “They’ve known since 2010 this telescope was coming. It was on the schedule. It’s on them,” Brickhouse said by phone from a hardware store, where he said he was shopping for a lens cap. “If you’ve had 16 years to get ready and you’re still not ready, that’s not the telescope’s fault. It’s just common sense.”
Astronomers at Pelham Ridge said the three-month journey to the telescope’s observing post, a point of gravitational balance on the far side of Earth from the sun, should give most galaxies enough time to arrange themselves, though they cautioned that the most distant galaxies are seen as they were billions of years ago and will therefore appear in their pictures exactly as they were the last time anyone told them to tidy up.
Sollner said that by Monday morning the observatory had received 4,100 requests from galaxies asking to be photographed only from the left, and one, from the Andromeda galaxy, asking whether the telescope could come back in a few billion years, when it may have merged with ours and will be, in its words, “more settled.”