Overview
- At Goddard on Tuesday, NASA showed the fully assembled Roman telescope, confirmed testing is complete, and set shipment to Kennedy in mid-June with a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch as soon as early September 2026.
- Roman pairs a Hubble-size 2.4-meter mirror with a wide-field camera that images about 100 times more sky per shot and surveys more than 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
- The mission will map hundreds of millions of galaxies and thousands of supernovae to probe dark matter and dark energy, while running a microlensing campaign expected to find tens of thousands of exoplanets.
- A high-contrast coronagraph will test starlight blocking to directly image far fainter planets than current instruments can, laying groundwork for a future Habitable Worlds Observatory.
- Operating near the Sun–Earth L2 point about 930,000 miles from Earth, Roman is projected to return roughly 20,000 terabytes of data in five years to guide follow-ups by Webb, Hubble, Euclid, and Rubin.