Overview
- The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026, from Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy with its side boosters recovered and the observatory successfully separating from the upper stage.
- Roman will travel about one million miles to the Sun–Earth Lagrange Point 2 where teams will deploy its instruments and perform roughly 100 days of calibration before science operations begin.
- Its Wide Field Instrument is a 300‑megapixel infrared camera that pairs a 2.4‑meter Hubble‑class primary mirror with a field of view more than 100 times larger, allowing surveys at a speed Hubble cannot match.
- Science goals include creating a multi‑petabyte sky survey to map billions of galaxies for studies of dark matter and dark energy and conducting a large census of exoplanets using microlensing, transits, and a coronagraph technology demo.
- NASA plans routine five‑year primary operations with possible extension if fuel allows, daily data downlinks of about 1–1.4 TB feeding public archives, and collaboration with STScI and Caltech/IPAC for community access.