SPACE/COSMOS
NASA launches Roman telescope to build biggest map of the universe yet
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched from Florida on Sunday, beginning a mission to survey vast swathes of the sky and test whether the standard model of the universe still holds up.
NASA launched its new flagship space telescope on Sunday, embarking on a multi-year mission to create an unprecedented map of the cosmos and shed light on some of the biggest mysteries in physics.
Standing more than 12 metres tall, the state-of-the-art observatory launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26am local time (1:26pm CEST) aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
US President Donald Trump, who phoned into NASA's post-launch press conference, congratulated the agency on the launch, calling it part of "the golden age of America".
Developed over more than a decade at a cost topping $4 billion (€3.4bn), the telescope is named after pioneering US astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who became known as the "Mother of Hubble," another of NASA's flagship telescopes.
While Hubble revealed that the universe is expanding faster than previously thought, Roman will seek to answer some of the other unsolved mysteries, including those of dark matter and dark energy.
"Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in April when he unveiled the project to the press.
'Studying the invisible'
With a field of view more than 100 times larger than Hubble's — and significantly wider than James Webb's — Roman will survey vast swathes of the sky from a vantage point 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, which it will take about 100 days to reach.
Designed to work in tandem with other observatories such as Webb, which offers greater power and precision, Roman aims to discover thousands of exoplanets as well as tens of thousands of supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars.
"It will be the biggest catalogue of astronomical objects anybody's ever produced, and it will help us understand how common are solar systems like our own," said Dave Content, Roman's technical manager.
The new telescope will also shed light on two of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark matter and dark energy. Their origins remain unknown, but together they are believed to make up about 95% of the universe.
Dark matter is thought to act as a kind of gravitational glue, while dark energy is believed to be a repulsive force driving the universe's expansion.
With its infrared vision, Roman will be able to detect light emitted by celestial objects billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time and offering scientists a glimpse into the universe's distant past and helping them better understand these two mysterious phenomena.
Testing the standard model
Roman's observations will complement the work of the Rubin Observatory in Chile and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid probe, and are highly anticipated because they could challenge scientists' understanding of the universe's structure.
Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist, said recent research suggests the way scientists have been thinking about the universe's early expansion, based on the predictions of existing models, may be wrong.
"Recent observations hint that our standard model of the universe is incorrect," she told a press conference on Saturday, adding that Roman will help clear that up.
"It will definitively say, 'Yeah, the model works, or it doesn't.' And if it doesn't, it's going to provide us with the precision and quality of data that will allow us to start to distinguish between those options."
Scientists and the general public will have access to all of Roman's data. But the sheer volume will be daunting, Content warned.
The telescope will be generating about 1.3 terabytes of data a day, "which means you basically can't download the data to anybody's laptop," he said.
For McEnery, the more data, the better.
"I very much hope, and in fact expect, that the most exciting science from Roman will be a surprise, something we couldn't predict, and that will set the stage for the next deeper set of questions for future missions to address."
Public reacts to Ariane 6 rocket launch with MTG-I2
Ariane 6 launched the MTG-I2 satellite from French Guiana, a new-generation Meteosat that strengthens Europe's pledge to weather monitoring. "Euronews" spoke to several people after the event to share their excitement first-hand.
Witnessing the launch of a rocket is not something you can enjoy every day; only a few lucky spectators were able to watch live from French Guiana as Ariane 6 carried MTG-I2 into orbit, the new generation of weather satellites that will monitor the atmospheric conditions affecting Earth.
Those attending the event in Tucán were keen to share with "Euronews" their impressions after experiencing the thunderous launch, a new step in space exploration for European science.
With this third-generation Meteosat satellite, Europe is at the forefront of monitoring and preventing meteorological events.
"Never achieved before": meteorologist analyses MTG-I2 leap to forecast disasters
Panos Giannopoulos from Greece's National Meteorological Service, who has spent years interpreting satellite images, tells "Euronews" what changes with the new Meteosat launched from French Guiana, the world's most advanced weather satellite.
On 28 August, the MTG-I2 (Meteosat Third Generation Imager-2) satellite lifted off from Europes Spaceport in Kourou aboard an Ariane 6 rocket, on the launchers ninth mission and its first flight to a geostationary transfer orbit. With this launch, ESA and Eumetsat complete the first operational trio in the Meteosat Third Generation constellation, positioned 36,000 kilometres above the equator to keep constant watch over the weather in Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa.
To understand what is really changing with this satellite, we spoke to someone who has spent decades interpreting satellite images in his daily work: Panos Giannopoulos, a meteorologist at the Hellenic National Meteorological Service (HNMS) and weather presenter at SKAI Media Group.
"When I started working 25 years ago, we only had one image every 30 minutes, with three channels; it was the first generation of Meteosat, launched two decades earlier," he recalls. The second generation, he explains, marked a clear difference: 12 channels and images every ten minutes - every five over Europe - which also made it possible to combine channels to detect fog, dust, volcanic ash and track the evolution of storms, from their birth until they dissipate.
With the third generation, to which MTG-I2 belongs, the leap forward is even greater. The new satellite will scan the upper quarter of the Earth, centred on Europe, every two and a half minutes, something which, according to Giannopoulos, "has never been achieved before anywhere in the world, not even in the United States". It is a change which, he admits, may overwhelm human analytical capacity: "I do not know whether meteorologists on our own can make full use of all that information, but with the help of artificial intelligence, these images every 2.5 minutes can greatly improve very short-range forecasting."
This new generation of satellites also carries a lightning detector, something Meteosat has never had before, capable of taking 1,000 samples per second in a very narrow band of the spectrum. And it does not arrive alone: MTG-S, the second satellite in the family, launched in 2025, is already operating in orbit, measuring humidity and temperature profiles in the atmosphere. "Up to now we have depended above all on weather balloons launched every 12 hours from a limited number of locations. That satellite has been delivering data for less than a year, and they are already being fed into global prediction models," the meteorologist notes.
The MTG-I2 will still take around six months to complete commissioning before it is integrated and calibrated alongside its two sister satellites. From then on, expected around April 2027, the three will operate as a single system. For Giannopoulos, the verdict is clear: "This third generation of Meteosat will have an impact both on very short-range forecasting - the next two or three hours - and on the usual one-to-ten-day range."
Venus’s Mysterious Clouds May Hide An Exceptionally Strong Light Absorber
Key Takeaways:
- A new Astrobiology study models Venus’s UV/blue “unknown absorber” as the absorption of bulk cloud liquid, not just how the pale-yellow clouds look from space.
- Matching 365–455 nm reflectance implies a very strong absorber (about
1{,}278\,\mathrm{cm}^{-1}at 375 nm)—high efficiency, high concentration, or both—with a steep drop-off that does not match typical sulfuric-acid “tar.” - The authors do not claim life or a specific molecule; they set lab and mission tests (including planned in-situ fluorescence work) that any organic or inorganic candidate must meet.
Venus appears pale yellow in visible light, but ultraviolet images reveal dramatic dark and bright patterns moving with the planet’s upper sulfuric acid clouds. Scientists have known about these markings for roughly a century, yet the chemical identity of the material responsible—the “unknown absorber”—remains unresolved.
An international research team has now placed new quantitative constraints on the properties of this mysterious absorber. By combining observations of Venus with radiative-transfer modeling, the researchers estimated how strongly the liquid inside Venus’s cloud droplets would need to absorb light to reproduce the planet’s observed ultraviolet and blue reflectance.
The study, published in Astrobiology, approached the mystery from a new perspective. It used a model to answer a question posed by lead author Dr. Jan SPACEK: If we were to collect Venus’s cloud droplets into a spectrometric cuvette, how would the re-formed bulk liquid appear?
The difference between how a cloud looks and how its material looks when collected in bulk can be striking. Cigarette smoke, for example, appears white because its sub-micrometer particles scatter light very efficiently. Yet when the smoke particles are collected in a flask, they form a dense suspension of burned tobacco—a tar-like sludge. A similar optical principle applies to Venus’s clouds, as their particle size distribution is comparable to that of cigarette smoke. Thus, even though the clouds appear pale yellow to a remote observer, the liquid forming the cloud droplets might be surprisingly dark.
“Our model effectively asks what would happen if we could collect that cloud material into a cuvette and put it into a laboratory spectrometer,” said lead author Jan SPACEK of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, USA. “This is important, as light absorption in a bulk liquid may be correlated with the concentration of light-absorbing material in the solution.”
The researchers combined observations of Venus with a radiative-transfer model that accounts for multiple scattering by cloud droplets and atmospheric molecules. They translated the astronomical observations into a quantity routinely measured in laboratory UV-visible spectroscopy: the absorption coefficient of the bulk cloud liquid.
“The key is that Venus’s cloud particles scatter sunlight very efficiently, so the brightness observed from space cannot be directly compared with the absorption of a bulk liquid measured in the laboratory,” said Dr. LEE Yeon Joo of the Planetary Atmospheres Group within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), S. Korea, who performed the radiative-transfer model calculations in the study. “By accounting for the scattering and absorption by the cloud particles and atmosphere, the model allows us to estimate how strongly the liquid of cloud droplets itself must absorb light.”
Within the modeled 365-455 nm range, the required decadic absorption coefficient reaches approximately 1,278 cm-1 at 375 nm. The result implies that the unknown absorber must either absorb light very efficiently, occur at a very high concentration, or both.
Highly absorbing conjugated organic molecules could satisfy this requirement. Here, “organic” refers to carbon-based compounds and does not imply a biological origin. Molecules with light-absorption strengths characteristic of efficient porphyrinoid pigments would require concentrations on the order of 10 grams per liter. The authors stress that they are not proposing chlorophyll, heme, or any specific biological pigment as the Venus absorber; these compounds serve only as familiar examples of efficient light absorbers.
The shape of the spectrum provides another important constraint. Simple organics exposed to concentrated sulfuric acid can form dark, chemically complex “tar-like” mixtures. However, such complex mixtures tend to absorb broadly across the visible spectrum, appearing brown or black. That does not match the steep decrease in absorption inferred for Venus between 365 and 455 nm.
“If the observed light absorption is due to conjugated organic matter, the relatively sharp absorption profile is consistent with a chemically defined absorber that resists conversion into the tar-like mixture we typically observe with organics dissolved in concentrated sulfuric acid,” Spacek said.
“Paradoxically, by placing additional constraints on the unknown absorber, we might have made the mystery even more intriguing,” said Janusz J. PETKOWSKI of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland.
“The model places a demanding constraint on any proposed absorber,” said Paul B. RIMMER of the University of Cambridge, UK. “Many of the proposed inorganic candidates would need to be present at very high concentrations to match the required absorption.”
The findings do not show that life exists in Venus’s clouds, nor do they demonstrate that the absorber is organic. Instead, the study establishes quantitative requirements that any candidate—organic or inorganic—must satisfy, including absorption efficiency, concentration, atmospheric distribution, and compatibility with a realistic cloud-particle size distribution.
These constraints can now be tested experimentally and, ultimately, by direct exploration. The Morning Star Missions to Venus initiative is developing in situ approaches to investigate Venusian cloud chemistry, including searches for complex organic molecules and measurements relevant to the unknown absorber. The Autofluorescence Nephelometer, designed to search Venus’s cloud particles for fluorescence we expect to be associated with organic molecules, is planned for a Rocket Lab mission to Venus.
The study connects remote observations, laboratory chemistry, and future exploration in a new attempt to solve one of Venus’s longest-standing mysteries.
