Roman Space Telescope, NASA's next "great observatory," poised for Sunday launch

TL;DR

The Roman Space Telescope will launch Sunday on a $4.3 billion mission.
It features a donated Hubble-class mirror originally built for a spy satellite.
The telescope will capture wide-angle, ultra-sharp images, collecting data 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
Key scientific goals include studying dark matter and dark energy, and discovering potentially habitable exoplanets.
Roman is expected to resolve discrepancies in current cosmological models, known as the 'Hubble Tension'.
It will also use a coronagraph to detect exoplanets and analyze their atmospheres.
The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer.
It will be stationed at Lagrange Point No. 2 (L2), about a million miles from Earth.
The mission includes three core surveys: High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, and Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey.
Roman is expected to discover over 100,000 exoplanets and map 20 billion stars.

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