Picture a single camera capable of photographing 100 times more sky than the legendary Hubble Space Telescope in one shot. That camera exists, and on 30 August it will rocket away from Earth. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — named after the astronomer who fought to make Hubble possible in the first place — is finally ready to launch, and scientists around the world are barely containing their excitement. So what is Roman actually going after?

Two of the most embarrassing gaps in human knowledge: dark energy and dark matter. Together, these invisible forces are thought to make up roughly 95 percent of everything in the universe. We cannot see them directly. We cannot touch them.

We only know they exist because of the strange ways they bend light and push galaxies apart. Roman is designed to map that strangeness across billions of light-years, giving researchers their sharpest picture yet of a cosmos that stubbornly refuses to make sense. The telescope will also hunt for rogue planets — worlds that were flung out of their solar systems and now drift alone through the dark, belonging to no star. It will search for clues in thousands of new exoplanets and probe the history of how galaxies, including our own Milky Way, were assembled piece by piece over cosmic time.