Nasa begins first space tests of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Nasa's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope may only have launched less than a month ago, but it has already reached an important milestone.

Scientists have begun testing some of its most important equipment, including its main camera, called the Wide Field Instrument.

The huge camera has now been successfully switched on and will be able to capture enormous areas of the sky using infrared - invisible heat - to take pictures instead of light.

Scientists hope the telescope will help them solve mysteries about space, and learn more about distant planets as it begins its mission in orbit.

Nasa announced that its team had successfully activated the Wide Field Instrument, or WFI, and that the 300-megapixel infrared camera is working as expected.

Each photograph the camera takes will capture a huge area of the sky, while still showing lots of detail.

Before the team could switch it on, the instrument had to rest for 10 days so it could dry out and be decontaminated.

Scientists then cooled it down to -143C before activating its eighteen infrared detectors.

Nasa says it hopes to release Roman's first images by early 2027.

Other parts of the telescope have also begun initial testing, including the telescope's Coronagraph Instrument.

Its job is to block the glare from stars, helping scientists see the much fainter light reflected from planets orbiting them.

The US space agency also added that the telescope could keep working for up to 22 years - more than twice as long as the 10-year lifespan previously planned for the mission.

Nasa's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope blasted off into space from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 30 August.

The telescope is named after famous American astronomer Dr Nancy Grace Roman.

Dr Roman was the first chief of astronomy at Nasa, and the first woman to hold a high-level executive job there.

It's currently on a 100-day journey to a place roughly one million miles from Earth, where it will start charting planets outside our solar system.

The telescope is on a mission to explore dark energy, black holes and other mysteries of the universe.

The ultra-powerful telescope has been designed to explore distant exoplanets, capturing massive, ultra-detailed pictures of the cosmos using its wide-angle camera lens and infrared vision.

Scientists hope it could help uncover hundreds of millions of galaxies and brand new scientific discoveries, changing astronomy as we know it for decades to come.