NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Completes Construction

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now fully assembled following the integration of its two major segments on November 25 at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The mission is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026.

According to NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, completing the Roman observatory is a defining moment for the agency, emphasizing that transformative science depends on disciplined engineering.

Roman will undergo final testing before moving to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations in summer 2026. The telescope is equipped with two main instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument.

The Wide Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel camera that will capture images covering a patch of the sky larger than the apparent size of a full moon. It is expected to gather 20,000 terabytes of data over its five-year primary mission, gathering data hundreds of times faster than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The Coronagraph Instrument will demonstrate technologies for directly imaging planets around other stars, blocking the glare from those stars to reveal faint planetary light. Roman's mission will focus on studying dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets, with the expectation of unveiling over 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies.

The telescope's first three core surveys will account for 75% of the primary mission, including a High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey that will unveil more than a billion galaxies. Other surveys will include a High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey and a Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, which will provide deep views of the Milky Way galaxy.

NASA has committed to making all of Roman's data publicly available to support broad scientific inquiry. The mission honors Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, who advocated for making cosmic vistas accessible to all.

As stated by Jackie Townsend, Roman's deputy project manager, the mission will acquire enormous quantities of astronomical imagery that will allow for groundbreaking discoveries, honoring Dr. Roman's legacy.