NASA‘s latest flagship telescope is on its way to a million‑mile‑distant orbit to map the universe and hunt for distant planets.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off at 7:26 a.m. ET on Sunday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Riding a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the spacecraft separated from its rocket and began its space journey.
Mission leaders say Roman will reshape astronomy by pairing a wide, sharp view of the universe with powerful tools to probe dark matter, dark energy, and distant exoplanets.
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The observatory, with a lifecycle cost of about $4.3 billion, will make its data public as soon as it’s processed. And what a firehose of data it’s expected to collect. Hubble gathered 172 terabytes of science data in its first 30 years; Roman will downlink about 1.4 terabytes every day, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for science at NASA. What Roman can do in a single month to survey the Milky Way would take Hubble about 100 years.
“The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a sheer powerhouse,” Fox said. “It is literally a speed machine. The speed at which we’ll be scanning the sky, delivering vast amounts of data, and returning results will be at an unprecedented rate never done before.”
Under the hood, Roman is about the size of a tour bus and as heavy as a male killer whale. Its nearly 8-foot primary mirror matches Hubble’s in size but is less than a quarter of the weight, thanks to newer technology. A set of six solar panels, each about the size of a large door, will provide four kilowatts of power.
Roman is headed to a spot called the second sun‑Earth Lagrange point, or L2, the same orbit around the sun as the James Webb Space Telescope. From that vantage point, Roman can stare at a vast, steady slice of the sky without Earth photobombing the view.
“The images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them,” said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman in April.
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The U.S. space agency developed the telescope with a five-year primary mission in mind. Fuel will determine the observatory’s ultimate lifetime, but engineers designed the spacecraft so that it could be refueled in space, should future on-orbit servicing and fill-ups become possible.
The mission is named for Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and a key architect of the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. She championed space‑based telescopes that see above Earth’s haze.
Roman carries two main instruments: the Wide Field Instrument, a 300‑megapixel infrared camera, and the Coronagraph Instrument, a tech demo that will try to directly photograph planets in the glare of nearby stars.
In most telescopes, the image is sharpest in the middle and softens toward the edges. Roman is the opposite. Engineers lined the camera’s 18 detectors along that ring, so the telescope can grab big chunks of sky in a single image instead of stitching them together one narrow pointing at a time.
Roman will go after exoplanets in three main ways. With its camera, it will stare toward the crowded center of the galaxy and watch hundreds of millions of stars for brief brightenings caused by microlensing — when a foreground star and its planets act like a natural magnifying glass for a background star. That method is especially good at finding planets similar to the ones in our own solar system, including worlds as light as Mars, plus “rogue” planets that drift through space without a star. The same data will reveal transits — tiny dips in a star’s light when a planet crosses in front of it, zeroing in on tens of thousands of hot, close‑in giants.
The coronagraph will zoom in on only a few nearby stars at a time. By blocking a star’s light inside the telescope, astronomers should be able to see much fainter planets beside it. To pull that off, Roman will rely on optics that can subtly change shape to cancel out leftover glare, said Vanessa Bailey, NASA’s coronagraph scientist for the telescope.
“We’re using something called deformable mirrors — exactly what it sounds like. They are mirrors that have thousands of tiny pistons on the back that can move at nanometer, or even picometer, scales to correct the very small polishing errors or optical misalignment errors in the system to block out light better,” Bailey told Mashable. “This will be the first time we’re using those in space.”
Roman’s panoramic view is what makes the observatory powerful for mapping dark matter, the invisible scaffolding that outweighs normal matter and helps hold galaxies together. Astronomers first saw its influence when they realized galaxies and stars were moving too fast to be bound by visible matter alone.
Roman will trace where this hidden material lies by watching how it slightly stretches the shapes of distant galaxies. By tracking those distortions across huge areas of sky, Roman can build a 3D map showing where dark matter clumps and how its clumps have grown over cosmic time.
Credit: NASA / Sydney Rohde (Rocz)
Those maps will feed directly into Roman’s study of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to have made the universe’s expansion speed up. Instead of slowing down after the Big Bang, galaxies are racing apart faster and faster, as if some invisible pressure is pushing them away from one another.
Three major surveys will drive this science. One will map more than a billion galaxies far from the dusty plane of the Milky Way, combining images and data to build 3D maps of structures. Another will repeatedly image the same region to make movies of the changing sky, catching around 100,000 explosive events — including Type Ia supernovas, star explosions that give off a predictable amount of light, making them handy tools for measuring distances in space.
The third will stare toward the crowded center of the Milky Way. Roman’s sharp, infrared vision will let it watch hundreds of millions of stars through intervening dust, searching for the microlensing events.
“What makes me most excited about Roman is the discovery potential. With 2 billion galaxies, we’ll have 2,000 objects that are one-in-a-million,” said Julie McEnery, senior project scientist. “We’ll find new things that go bump in the night.”
Before science can begin, Roman will spend about three months traveling out to its orbit. NASA expects to release the first Roman images in January 2027, after early calibration is complete.