NASA’s next powerful space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is getting ready to leave Earth later this year. The agency is aiming for an early September launch for Roman, which will offer a view of the cosmos 100 times larger than the famous Hubble telescope.
The September date is the earliest Roman could possibly launch. NASA has set a deadline for its liftoff, ensuring it will go up aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket no later than May 2027.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after NASA’s first chief astronomer and the “mother” of Hubble, first came into public view in 2016. Back then, people knew it as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST. Although Roman’s mirror is roughly the same size as Hubble’s, its ability to capture much larger sections of the sky sets it apart.
“Roman will work together with other NASA observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, in 2023. She explained that those telescopes zoom in on rare objects once found, but Roman’s wide view will discover many new ones.
“Since we’ve never had an observatory like this scanning the cosmos before, we could even find entirely new types of objects and events,” she added. After launching into space, Roman will travel to a special spot nearly 1 million miles from Earth. From there, it will use two main instruments to explore space.
One is a massive 300.8-megapixel camera that can see light from visible to near-infrared. The other is a high-contrast coronagraph, which will help it capture images of exoplanets that would usually be hidden by the bright light of
their stars.
Roman’s main goal is “to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets and astrophysics.” Despite many years of study, scientists still don’t know much about dark energy, which makes up about 68 percent of the universe. Beyond its scientific mission, Roman is also expected to send back amazing new pictures of our universe.
