Overview
- Launch teams at Kennedy Space Center have integrated the Nancy Grace Roman telescope with a SpaceX Falcon Heavy and are targeting liftoff at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 30, with live coverage beginning about an hour earlier.
- After separation Roman will begin a roughly one‑month cruise to the Sun–Earth L2 point followed by about 100 days of deployment, mirror alignment and instrument commissioning before regular science operations begin.
- The Wide Field Instrument is a 300‑megapixel near‑infrared camera that combines Hubble‑class sharpness with a field of view roughly 100 times larger, and the mission also carries a coronagraph technology demonstrator to test direct imaging of exoplanets.
- NASA projects the observatory will produce about 1–1.4 terabytes of downlinked data per day that will be released publicly, and agency estimates suggest Roman could discover tens of thousands up to roughly 100,000 exoplanets over its prime mission.
- Roman’s five‑year prime mission, with a possible five‑year extension, is designed to reshape cosmology and exoplanet science by enabling wide‑area surveys, broad community access to large data sets, and rapid follow‑up by researchers worldwide with first public images expected in early 2027.