NASA and SpaceX sent the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into space this morning, lifting off at 7:26 a.m. EDT from Kennedy Space Center aboard a Falcon Heavy. The launch went as planned. Telemetry came in minutes later, the observatory separated about 31 minutes after liftoff, and the side boosters returned to Cape Canaveral.
Roman uses a 2.4-meter mirror, the same size as Hubble’s, but it sees a patch of sky more than 100 times larger in a single shot. Over a five-year primary mission, it is expected to image more than 50 times as much sky as Hubble covered in 30 years. Its 300-megapixel infrared camera is built for wide surveys, not narrow portraits.
The telescope is now on a roughly 100-day trip to the Earth-Sun L2 point, about a million miles from Earth. From there it will hunt for clues to dark energy and dark matter, map galaxies across cosmic time, and look for exoplanets through gravitational microlensing. A coronagraph on board will also try to take direct images of planets around other stars.
The mission arrived at the pad months early. NASA had been targeting no later than May 2027. Teams at Goddard finished the spacecraft sooner than planned, and the launch date moved up to August 30. First science images are expected in early 2027. Once it starts working, Roman will send back about 1.4 terabytes of data a day.
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