NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, August 30, beginning a mission to investigate dark energy, dark matter and planets beyond the solar system. NASA said a SpaceX Falcon Heavy carried the observatory from Launch Complex 39A, while the Associated Press reported the launch cost of the telescope at $4.3 billion.
The bus-sized observatory is traveling toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, known as L2, about 1 million miles or 1.6 million kilometers from Earth. NASA expects the journey, deployments and commissioning tests to take more than three months. Roman will share the region with the James Webb Space Telescope, using a stable orbit that requires relatively little fuel.
Roman's 2.4-meter primary mirror is approximately the same diameter as Hubble's, but its 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument combines Hubble-like sharpness with a field of view at least 100 times larger, according to NASA. Each image will cover an area about 1.5 times the apparent size of the full Moon, allowing the telescope to survey billions of galaxies and stars far faster than earlier space observatories.
Scientists will use those wide surveys to trace how galaxies formed and how the universe expanded, looking for the gravitational effects of invisible dark matter and for evidence about the force called dark energy. Roman will also conduct a statistical census of planetary systems through methods including gravitational microlensing. A separate coronagraph will test advanced technology for blocking starlight and directly imaging faint giant planets around nearby stars.
The European Space Agency said it supplied star trackers, batteries, coronagraph detectors and deep-space communications support. Roman's panoramas are expected to complement detailed observations from Webb and Hubble, ESA's Euclid mission and visible-light surveys by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. NASA has said processed Roman data will become public without an exclusive access period, widening participation in the mission's discoveries.
Roman is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer and a central advocate for space observatories. Its primary science mission is planned for five years, with the spacecraft designed to support a further five-year extension and possible refueling. NASA expects the first science images in early 2027 after calibration, marking the next major test of whether the new observatory can deliver its promised panoramic view of the cosmos.
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