Overview
- NASA says the observatory could launch as early as fall 2026, with several reports citing early September 2026, and the agency keeps a firm latest date of May 2027.
- The telescope is fully built and in final testing at Goddard, with a planned move to Kennedy Space Center in summer 2026 for launch processing.
- Roman is set to ride a SpaceX Falcon Heavy to the Sun–Earth L2 point about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, which offers a cold, stable environment for long, deep looks at the sky.
- The 2.4‑meter mirror feeds a Wide-Field Instrument that captures areas about 100 times larger than Hubble per exposure at roughly 300 megapixels, plus an experimental coronagraph that blocks starlight to image nearby exoplanets and dust disks.
- The five-year prime mission will map billions of galaxies, probe dark matter and dark energy, and search for planets using microlensing, producing about 20 petabytes of mostly public data or roughly 11 terabytes per day.