NASA has launched its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Florida, beginning a mission designed to investigate dark energy, dark matter, and planets beyond the solar system.

The roughly $4 billion observatory lifted off from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on August 30. Roman will travel to Lagrange Point 2, about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth, before beginning scientific observations.

The telescope combines Hubble-like image quality with a much wider field of view. NASA expects it to survey more than two billion galaxies and discover thousands of exoplanets during its planned five-year mission, which could potentially be extended for another five years.