Early in the morning on Sunday, August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

It's now on a month-long journey to a spot known as Lagrange Point 2, or L2, which is more than 900,000 miles away from Earth.

Our guest today is Julie McEnery, who serves as senior project scientist for the mission.

She's here to tell us why scientists are so excited about this new space telescope and what it could teach us about the universe.

Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today. It's a pleasure to be here. So how long has this telescope been in the works?

If you start the clock when scientists first started imagining "What kind of mission would you want to put together to explore the newly discovered accelerating universe?" it starts in the early 2000s.

Well, and so let's take a step back for our listeners to talk about that. You know, what discoveries led scientists to want an observatory with these capabilities?

You know, what questions were they starting to get excited to answer?

Well, there's three separate questions. So one of the most prominent was the discovery that our universe is accelerating.

The idea that our universe is accelerating is crazy, right? What you know about in the universe is that the universe has matter, and gravity acts on matter, and it pulls it together.