NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a next-generation space observatory designed to give astronomers a much wider view of the universe while investigating some of astronomy’s biggest mysteries.
Roman launched on August 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy and is now traveling roughly one million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth toward the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, where it will operate near the James Webb Space Telescope.
Roman has a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) primary mirror, the same diameter as Hubble’s, but its Wide Field Instrument can capture an area of sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can in a single observation. This combination of sharp images and a huge field of view will allow Roman to survey enormous numbers of galaxies and stars, helping scientists investigate dark matter, dark energy, the evolution of galaxies, and planets beyond our solar system.
Roman also carries a Coronagraph Instrument, a technology demonstration designed to block the overwhelming glare of nearby stars so astronomers can directly observe faint exoplanets and planet-forming disks. Over its mission, Roman’s enormous surveys could reveal objects and phenomena that astronomers were not specifically searching for, making it not only a tool for answering existing questions but also a powerful discovery machine for finding things in the universe we may not yet know exist.
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