Trump Hails NASA's Roman Telescope Launch as 'Hottest in Space'

U.S. President Donald Trump phoned into a NASA news conference on Sunday to congratulate the agency on the successful launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, calling the mission a sign that America is "the hottest in space."

Speaking from Cape Canaveral, Florida, shortly after the spacecraft lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, Trump told NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and the team, "We're the hottest in space, and we have the hottest country anywhere in the world. So let's keep it all going."

The $4.3 billion observatory blasted off at daybreak from Kennedy Space Center and is now bound for a point about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, where it will join the James Webb Space Telescope.

Named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, the bus-sized telescope will take more than three months to reach its destination. Once there, it will survey the cosmos with a field of view at least 100 times wider than Hubble's and a scan rate over 1,000 times faster.

Isaacman said Roman could reveal more than 100,000 new exoplanets and help scientists study dark matter and dark energy — mysteries that may reshape our understanding of the universe.

Nicky Fox, NASA's associate administrator for science, said the telescope's coronagraph technology will allow researchers to examine atmospheres of distant worlds and ask, "Is there another Earth 2.0 looking back at me?"

Fox added that Roman is expected to find billions of galaxies, tens of billions of new stars, tens of thousands of planets, and thousands of supernovae.

Roman will work alongside Hubble, Webb, the European Space Agency's Euclid spacecraft, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile to unlock some of the universe's biggest secrets.