Liftoff! NASARoman begins its flight to space. The Roman telescope’s wide field of view will generate never-before-seen images, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe.

‍✅ Booster Engine Cutoff
✅ Booster Separation
✅ Main Engine Cutoff
✅ Stage Separation
✅ Second Engine Start 1
✅ Fairing Jettison

It's amazing how much happens in the first few minutes of flight. An incredible opening sequence and Roman's journey is only just beginning!

First and second stage separation complete. The first stage’s job is done, while the Falcon Heavy’s second stage and NASARoman continue the journey.

Fairing separation. Free of its protective shell, our Roman telescope has its first taste of space.

✅ Second Engine Cutoff 1 confirmed.

The Falcon's second stage is now in a 16-minute coast phase of flight. There will be a second and final engine burn before deployment of the Roman spacecraft!

Acquisition of signal confirmed for our NASARoman telescope. We have spacecraft separation, and a last look at Roman, now flying on its own. go.nasa.gov/4chzg9c

Claim your pixel on one the first images from NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope! When Roman captures its first images (early 2027), each pixel will represent a piece of the cosmos never seen before at this resolution. Claim your pixel and be part of this historic moment! You will receive a certificate like the one above with your pixel number. » Adopt your pixel!

NASA's newest eye on the sky, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has begun its journey to unravel the secrets of dark matter, dark energy and Earthlike planets — months ahead of schedule.

The 9-ton telescope rode to space today aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that was launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. ET (11:26 UTC). The ascent went off without a hitch, setting up the telescope for a three-month cruise to a gravitational balance point known as Earth-sun L2, a million miles beyond our planet. The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters flew themselves back to landings on the Florida coast, near the launch site, while the center core booster splashed into the sea after stage separation.

NASA had originally scheduled liftoff for 2027, but the $4.3 billion mission came in ahead of schedule and under budget.

Here are five key facts about the Roman Space Telescope and its mission...

Researchers have developed fluorescent molecules that permit imaging of how DNA is packaged inside living cells at unprecedented resolution and, in preserved cells, at a resolution close to the width of the double helix itself.

The team tested the fluorescent probes on slices of bowel tissue taken from three cancer patients. These are ordinary wax-preserved samples, which is how almost all hospitals store patient biopsies.

In the tumors, the DNA was noticeably looser and more spread out than in the healthy tissue sitting right beside it.

Other studies have found that DNA unpacks steadily as cancer takes hold, and the researchers suggest that how loosely a cell's DNA is folded could eventually serve as a measure of how far a tumor has progressed or how aggressive it is.

Doctors currently examine these types of biopsies by eye, using a staining method more than a century old. The advance, described today in the journal Molecular Cell, raises the possibility that one day they could also look at how DNA occupies three-dimensional space inside cells as an additional clue for diagnosing and treating cancer.

"With the same dye we can do two very different things. In a living cell we can watch DNA moving, which tells us how chromatin, the natural state of DNA in cells, behaves. In a preserved cell we can zoom in until we are almost at the scale of the DNA molecule itself. Combining both approaches helps us see one of the main layers of control in human biology in unprecedented resolution," explains ICREA Research Professor Pia Cosma, senior author of the study.

Watching DNA in living cells
Every cell in the human body holds 2 meters of DNA squeezed into a very small space. How tightly it is folded up decides which genes are switched on and which stay off.

Almost all images of DNA folding come from cells that are already dead. Powerful microscope techniques needed to track individual components of DNA in cells typically require treating samples with harsh chemicals and strong laser lights that living cells cannot survive.

A team at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, the City University of Hong Kong and the Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences) Southern Medical University found a way to overcome this challenge by designing fluorescent probes.

Called HoTs, the dyes can navigate inside living cells on their own and stick to DNA. The probes are designed to blink intermittently, meaning they flicker on and off like fairy lights. The researchers tested them in living human skin cells and in living HeLa cancer cells grown in the laboratory.

If every dye lit up at once, microscopes would take a blurry picture. By blinking one at a time, an advanced microscope works out exactly where each probe is. After taking thousands of snapshots, a computer program builds up a picture 10 times sharper than conventional microscopes.