Overview
- NASA, which unveiled the fully integrated Roman telescope Tuesday at Goddard, confirmed final assembly is complete and said the observatory will ship to Kennedy Space Center for launch preparations.
- Agency leaders set an early September 2026 launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, sending the spacecraft to the Sun–Earth L2 region about 1 million miles from Earth.
- Roman is built for wide, sharp views, capturing areas about 100 times larger than a single Hubble image and streaming roughly 11 terabytes of data to Earth each day.
- The core surveys will map hundreds of millions of galaxies to study dark matter and dark energy, while its exoplanet program will use microlensing to spot distant worlds and an experimental coronagraph to try direct imaging of giant planets.
- Project officials said Roman remains within its $4.3 billion life‑cycle cost cap and is about eight months ahead of schedule, a model they hope to apply to future flagships such as the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory.