NASA Unveils Roman Space Telescope To Build a New Atlas of the Universe

Overview

• NASA presented the fully assembled Roman telescope at its Goddard center in Maryland, calling it a next‑generation observatory that will map the cosmos.
• The silver‑hued spacecraft stands more than 12 meters tall and is set to ship to Florida for launch on a SpaceX rocket in early September.
• Roman’s camera will view an area more than 100 times larger than Hubble’s, surveying vast swaths of sky from about 1.5 million kilometers away at the Sun–Earth L2 point.
• Engineers estimate the mission will downlink around 11 terabytes of data each day, enough to surpass Hubble’s lifetime total in its first year.
• The mission aims to find tens of thousands of exoplanets and thousands of supernovas and to probe dark matter and dark energy, and it honors astronomer Nancy Grace Roman after more than a decade of work costing over $4 billion.