Cape Canaveral, Florida - NASA has launched its new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, designed to study distant planets, exploding stars, and black holes while surveying the universe on an unprecedented scale.

The telescope, named after one of the first women to hold a senior leadership position at NASA, blasted off aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Sunday.

The telescope is expected to reach its destination around 930,000 miles from Earth in about a month and send back its first images in early 2027.

The mission has a total budget of more than $4 billion. Astronomers are expected to use the telescope to study phenomena including exoplanets, exploding stars, and black holes.

US politics US Treasury bars some reporters from G20 finance talks: "blatant attempt to evade public scrutiny"

The Roman telescope operates in a similar way to the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990 and is now showing its age and operating with reduced capabilities, but Roman is designed to survey the sky much faster.

NASA scientists said observations Roman could carry out in a month would take Hubble a century to complete.

Hubble has collected around 400 terabytes of data in more than 35 years in space, while scientists expect Roman to produce more than 500 terabytes every year.

The James Webb Space Telescope, named after a former NASA administrator, was launched in late 2021 to complement Hubble. It observes the universe at different wavelengths from Hubble and Roman.