Overview
- The telescope, which NASA unveiled Tuesday at Goddard, is complete and slated to ship to Kennedy Space Center in mid-June for a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch as soon as early September.
- Project leaders said the mission is about eight months ahead of its formal May 2027 readiness date and remains within its $4.3 billion life-cycle cost cap.
- Roman’s 2.4-meter mirror pairs with a wide-field camera that images areas about 100 times larger than Hubble, enabling survey work roughly 1,000 times faster and a five-year archive of about 20,000 terabytes.
- Wide, repeated surveys will map hundreds of millions of galaxies and track thousands of Type Ia supernovas to measure how structure and expansion changed over time, sharpening tests of dark matter and dark energy.
- The mission will also search for thousands of exoplanets via gravitational microlensing and trial a high-contrast coronagraph for direct imaging, a step toward future missions focused on nearby Earth-like worlds.