Overview
- NASA advanced the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s launch by eight months to early September, with leaders praising a decade of work that brought the mission in ahead of schedule.
- The observatory is fully assembled and has cleared final tests, and NASA will ship it to the Kennedy Space Center for prelaunch processing.
- Roman is slated to fly on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy and cruise to the Sun–Earth L2 point about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth for stable, cold observing conditions.
- The telescope will scan the sky more than 1,000 times faster than Hubble, capture about 200 times more area per image, and downlink roughly 1.4 terabytes of science data each day.
- Core programs include surveys of dark energy and dark matter, a large hunt for exoplanets using transits and microlensing, and wide-area imaging that will feed detailed follow-up by the James Webb and Hubble telescopes.