The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch [soon] aboard a SpaceX rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When it becomes operational early next year, it will transform our view of the universe.

With a mirror the same size as the one in the Hubble Space Telescope but a field of view more than 100 times larger, NASA's newest tool is designed to survey vast swaths of sky quickly. It will hunt for dark energy's fingerprints and detect perhaps 100,000 exoplanets.

In August 2018, just four months before she died on Dec. 25, I had the great fortune to fly from Sydney to Washington, D.C., to interview the woman this telescope is named after. She was 93 years old, and over the hours we spent talking, she shared her remarkable life story...