The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s latest cosmic cartographer, is ready to fly. Named after the agency’s first chief astronomer, the $4.3 billion telescope will use its sharp infrared vision to capture sweeping views of the stars. Roman is expected to chart billions of galaxies, hundreds of black holes and dusty planet-forming disks, as well as a hundred thousand new worlds beyond our solar system. The telescope promises a cosmic panorama so wide and so crisp that it would take over half a million high-definition TVs to display in full. Its data will be used to probe the mysterious nature of dark matter, an invisible substance shaping the structure of our universe, and dark energy, a repulsive force threatening to rip the cosmos apart. Astronomers will also use Roman to complete the census of planets across the Milky Way. Part of the appeal, however, lies in the unexpected. In Roman’s treasure trove of data, who knows what scientists might find.

Roman is expected to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as early as 7:26 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday. SpaceX will launch the telescope on a Falcon Heavy rocket and is providing a livestream of the flight on its website and social media. You can also watch NASA’s livestream. In a news conference on Saturday morning, an official from the U.S. Space Force said that the weather forecast for the launch was 50 percent favorable. Should weather or another reason prevent liftoff on Sunday, a backup launch opportunity is scheduled for Monday at 7:22 a.m., with another window planned for Tuesday morning.

The telescope’s primary instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera that can capture a piece of sky wider than the apparent size of a full moon. Astronomers will stitch the images together to create maps of what the universe looked like as far back as when it was only a few hundred million years old. Within this data, scientists will look for different kinds of gravitational lensing, an effect that occurs when matter distorts the light radiating from an object behind it. The presence of dark matter can be inferred by the way its gravity bends the light of more distant galaxies in the background.

According to NASA, astronomers have discovered 6,354 exoplanets. With Roman, they expect to push that number to more than 100,000. One of Roman’s planet-finding techniques relies on microlensing, a type of gravitational lensing that happens on a smaller scale. The telescope can also capture planets crossing in front of their own stars, which cause a temporary dip in brightness. Roman will use its infrared camera to collect evidence of new worlds. But it has a second instrument called a coronagraph that will photograph already discovered exoplanets. This will demonstrate a technique that may one day be used to hunt for faraway Earths with NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory.