NASA recently revealed the first pictures of its newly constructed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which could soon help researchers hunt for exoplanets, map the Milky Way and unravel some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, such as the true nature of dark matter.
Experts have also revealed the most probable launch date for the next-generation spacecraft, confirming that it will likely lift off ahead of schedule — and could begin collecting data before the end of 2026.
New photos, released Dec. 4, show Roman standing upright in a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope is around 42 feet (12.7 meters) tall and weighs a hefty 9,184 pounds (4,166 kilograms). It began construction in February 2016, and the project has so far stayed within its initial budget of $4.3 billion, researchers say.
Once launched, Roman will be positioned around 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth at a Lagrange point — a fixed point relative to our planet where the gravity of two objects cancels out. Its specific Lagrange point will be Sun-Earth L2, where JWST and the European Space Agency’s Gaia and Euclid space telescopes already reside.
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“Completing the Roman observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said in a statement. “Transformative science depends on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered — piece by piece, test by test — an observatory that will expand our understanding of the universe.”
“With Roman’s construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery,” Julie McEnery, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard and Roman’s senior project scientist, said in the statement. “In the mission’s first five years, it’s expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies.”
What will Roman do?
Roman is equipped with two key instruments, which will define its objectives throughout its initial five-year mission. (Roman will likely remain operational beyond five years, but researchers have only planned what it will do until then.)
The first is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), a 288-megapixel camera attached to a 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) mirror, capable of capturing high-definition photos of the outer solar system, the edges of the visible universe and anything in-between in infrared light too faint to be seen by human eyes.
One of Roman’s main goals will be to create the most detailed map of the Milky Way’s center yet in the Galactic Plane Survey, which will account for at least 25% of its total observing time. But it will also search the wider universe for things like distant galaxy clusters and giant “cosmic voids,” which could help reveal the identity of dark matter and dark energy, NASA recently announced.
But the telescope’s secret weapon is arguably its Coronograph Instrument, which will block out the light from distant stars, allowing WFI to snap photos of their surrounding exoplanets, which would normally be obscured by stellar glare.
As of September 2025, scientists have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets in roughly 30 years. However, Roman is expected to find more than 15 times as many in half a decade, which would be a huge boon to scientists exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
“The question of ‘Are we alone?’ is a big one, and it’s an equally big task to build tools that can help us answer it,” Feng Zhao, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California and the Roman Coronagraph Instrument manager, said in the statement. This device could “bring us one step closer to that goal,” Zhao added.
In total, Roman is expected to collect more than 20,000 terabytes of data over the course of its initial five-year mission, which is equivalent to the storage space of around 3,000 iPhones: “The sheer volume of the data Roman will return is mind-boggling,” Dominic Benford, a NASA researcher and Roman’s program scientist, said in the statement.
When will Roman launch?
For years, Roman’s prospective launch has been earmarked for May 2027, with some predicting this date would be pushed back, like other previous NASA missions. For example, JWST was originally planned to launch in 2014, according to the Planetary Society.
However, early last year, rumors began to spread that Roman would not only meet its deadline but may actually launch early.
And on Jan. 5, at the 247th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, Arizona, project scientists confirmed that these rumors were true, revealing that, as it stands, the earliest likely launch date for Roman is Sept. 28, according to Space News.
Roman will launch onboard one of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rockets from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, meaning it will need to be transported more than 900 miles (1,450 km) from Goddard before lift-off. This is scheduled to occur in June, and whether or not this happens on time will give us a better indication of how likely a September launch date really is.
Once Roman is in orbit, it will take approximately 90 days for mission scientists to carry out the necessary steps to start collecting data, according to NASA. Therefore, if the telescope does launch on Sept. 28, it will likely start collecting data around Dec. 27.
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