HOUSTON  –  Nasa’s powerful next-generation telescope has blasted off into space from its launchpad in Florida, with a mission to explore dark energy, black holes and other mysteries of the Universe. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will capture vast panoramic views of space, with a field of vision at least 100 times larger than the famous Hubble Space Telescope. The mission begins with a 100-day journey to a vantage point roughly one million miles from Earth, where the telescope will then start charting planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. “Roman is going to change the way we look at the universe,” said Nicky Fox, a Nasa administrator. “It is going to discover tens of thousands, maybe even 100,000 new exoplanets.” US President Donald Trump dialled in to Nasa’s news conference on Sunday morning to congratulate the scientists working on the project. “You’re the hottest in space, and we have the hottest country anywhere in the world. So let’s keep it all going. You’re a big part of it,” Trump said. The telescope is named after physicist Nancy Grace Roman, who was Nasa’s first chief astronomer in the 1960s and its first female executive. During her career, she was instrumental in getting her namesake’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, approved by US Congress and later said its most interesting discovery was dark energy. The new Nancy Grace Roman telescope is similarly expected to revolutionise our understanding of the Universe, including through investigating dark energy. It has a five-year primary lifespan with a goal to operate for 10 years. Nasa says the telescope’s “crisp, sweeping surveys will help scientists investigate dark energy and dark matter, discover and characterise exoplanets, map billions of galaxies, study black holes, and explore objects from our own solar system to the edge of the observable Universe.” The origins of dark matter and dark energy remain unknown, but they are believed to make up about 95% of the Universe.