The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a roughly $US4 billion project, was carried aloft from NASA's Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Sunday.
The telescope is designed to investigate cosmic enigmas such as dark energy and dark matter, while also testing gravity at vast scales and searching for exoplanets, as planets beyond the solar system are called.
There were some weather concerns ahead of the launch but the rocket carried the telescope into space through blue skies and some scattered clouds.
Roman will travel through space toward an orbital location called Lagrange Point 2, situated about 1.6 million km from Earth. Its mission is planned for five years, though the US space agency said the telescope may have enough fuel for five additional years.
Roman will build on the capabilities of other orbiting observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, and the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990.
"It will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peered through a keyhole at the universe, while Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down," Nicola Fox, chief of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, told reporters on Saturday.
"Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as Hubble, but we survey the sky much faster," Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told reporters at a briefing in July.
McEnery said one month of Roman observations can survey Earth's entire home galaxy.
"One month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," she said.
"Webb is designed to be able to probe very deeply and with exquisite sensitivity into the universe, so we can find rare things in the early universe."
Roman will help in the understanding of two mysterious cosmic components — dark energy and dark matter — by creating the most comprehensive 3D map of the universe to date.
Its main survey, to take more than a year to complete, will cover more than two billion galaxies.
President Donald Trump's administration tried during both his first and second terms to reduce or eliminate funding for Roman, but Congress preserved it.
Roman's launch comes nine months ahead of schedule, according to NASA.
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