The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a NASA observatory designed to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics.
NASA’s latest and greatest space telescope, named after the agency’s first female chief astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, is targeted to launch eight months early.
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The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to have a field of view 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will survey vast swaths of sky during its five-year primary mission. During that time, scientists expect it to see an incredible number of new objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes and planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. This infographic previews some of the discoveries scientists anticipate from Roman’s data deluge.
(NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)
Once launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the telescope will investigate dark matter, dark energy and the exoplanets of our galaxy.
NASA said on Wednesday that the space telescope is set to launch on Aug. 30, more than eight months ahead of its previously planned May 2027 launch date.
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With less than three months to go, the Roman team is finishing up its final tasks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and engineers are packing the telescope up for its voyage down to Kennedy Space Center later in June.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch on Aug. 30, 2026.
(NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya / NASA)
Once the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope arrives, it will go through inspections to make sure it travels well.
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In the weeks leading up to launch day, engineers will put Roman under some tests and launch rehearsals before it is installed onto the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket that will take it into space, NASA said.
“While the mission was designed with dark energy, dark matter and planets outside our solar system in mind, Roman’s unprecedented observational capability will offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to explore a broad range of cosmic phenomena,” NASA said in its new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope blog.
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Roman will work alongside the James Webb Space Telescope already in space.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is photographed in the largest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
(NASA/Scott Wiessinger / NASA)
With Roman’s wide field of view and Webb’s sensitivity and wavelength range, the pair will help NASA discover far more about the cosmos than either could learn alone, NASA said.
Nancy Grace Roman is known as “the mother of Hubble” for her decades of work at NASA to help create the Hubble Space Telescope.
Nancy Grace Roman stands next to a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope outside the Hubble control center at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. Roman is known as the “Mother of Hubble.”
(NASA)
She was a fundamental piece of NASA’s early space exploration age, having been hired by the agency in 1959 and becoming their chief astronomer in 1960.
Roman worked at NASA for decades, before eventually retiring in 1997.
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Roman died in 2018 at the age of 93. To read more about her and her legacy at NASA, visit their website here.
