Meet Nasa's new super-powerful space telescope

We've got the famous Hubble telescope, the enormous James Webb and now there's a new super-powerful space telescope on the block!

Meet Nasa's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

This 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 and explore dark matter and dark energy - more on those later!

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

Nasa engineers have said that the telescope could be ready to launch as early as September 2026 - eight months earlier than previously thought.

Find out more about it below...

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.

She was also nicknamed the "Mother of Hubble," as she was incredibly important in making the telescope a reality.

Born in Tennessee, in the US in 1925 to music teacher and physicist/mathematician parents, Nancy grew up fascinated by the stars and knew she wanted to be a scientist when she grew up.

However, at the time there was a lot of sexism and many people said to Nancy that women could not be scientists.

"I was told by many people that a woman could not be an astronomer," Dr. Roman said when she was honoured with an award in 2016. "I'm glad I ignored them."

Alongside her incredible list of achievements in space science, Dr Roman spent her entire life championing programmes to encourage and support women and girls who wanted to pursue a career in science, physics and engineering.

The new telescope is fast - very fast!

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," said Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman.

"What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over Hubble's 35 years of service, it has gathered about 400 terabytes of data about space - but once Roman is up and working it should be able to create around 500 terabytes of data a year!

It has super-powerful imaging equipment.

Most telescopes can only view tiny pieces of the sky at one time.

However, Roman will be able to capture 100 times more sky in one image than a standard image from Nasa's Hubble Telescope by using its ultra-powerful 300 megapixel, infrared camera - called the Wide Field Instrument.

The telescope will not just be able to see wide, it will also be able to see deep.

It's high-tech Coronograph Instrument will act like a pair of "starglasses," allowing researchers to see distant planets and dust disks that are really far away, by blocking out the light of stars around them, that would otherwise be lost in the glare.

It's goal is to help us understand more about the universe

The new telescope will act as a cosmic detective helping us to better understand dark energy - a force that is causing the universe to expand faster and faster.

It will also aim to create the most detailed map of the cosmos ever made, by stitching together millions of galaxies in a single image.

"In the mission's first five years, it's expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies." said Julie Mcenery, Roman senior project scientist at Nasa Goddard.

"We stand to learn a tremendous amount of new information about the universe very rapidly after Roman launches."