NASA Completes Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Construction

NASA’s next big eye on the cosmos is now fully assembled. On November 25, technicians joined the interior and exterior portions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the largest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“The completion of the Roman Observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. “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. As Roman enters its final post-integration testing stage, we are focused on executing with precision and preparing for a successful launch on behalf of the global scientific community.”

After final tests, Roman will travel to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center launch site in Florida for launch preparations in summer 2026. Roman is expected to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for a launch as early as fall 2026. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will send the observatory to its final destination a million miles from Earth.

“Once construction of Roman is complete, we are on the brink of an unfathomable scientific breakthrough,” said Julie McEnery, lead scientist for the Roman project at NASA Goddard. “In the first five years of the mission, it is expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars and billions of galaxies. We will learn a huge amount of new information about the universe very quickly after the Roman launches.”

Observing from space will make Roman very sensitive to infrared light – light with a wavelength longer than our eyes can see – coming from far across the cosmos. Combining its sharp infrared vision with a panoramic view of space will allow astronomers to explore myriad cosmic topics, from dark matter and dark energy to distant worlds and solitary black holes, and to conduct research that would take hundreds of years using other telescopes.

“Over the course of our lifetime, a great mystery has emerged about the cosmos: why the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating. There is something fundamental about space and time that we don’t yet understand, and Novel was built to find out what it is,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With Roman as the full observatory, keeping the mission on track for a potentially early launch, we are a major step toward understanding the universe like never before. I couldn’t be more proud of the teams who have brought us to this point.”

Dual vision

Roman is equipped with two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Technology Demonstration Instrument.

The coronagraph will demonstrate new technologies for directly imaging planets around other stars. This will block the glare from distant stars and make it easier for scientists to see the faint light from planets orbiting them. The Coronagraph aims to image dusty worlds and disks around nearby stars in visible light to help us see giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than direct imaging of hot young super-Jupiters has mostly revealed so far.

“The question: “Are we alone?” “It’s a big problem, and it’s an equally big task to create tools that can help us answer it,” said Feng Zhao, Roman Coronagraph instrument manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The Roman Coronagraph will bring us closer to this goal. It’s incredible that we have the opportunity to test this material in space on an observatory as powerful as Roman.”

The coronagraph team will conduct a series of pre-planned observations over three months spread over the mission’s first year and a half of operations, after which the mission may conduct additional observations based on feedback from the scientific community.

The Wide Field Instrument is a 288 megapixel camera that will reveal the cosmos from our solar system to the far reaches of the observable universe. Using this instrument, each Roman image will capture a portion of the sky larger than the apparent size of a full moon. The mission will collect data hundreds of times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, totaling up to 20,000 terabytes (20 petabytes) during its five-year primary mission.

“The volume of data that Roman will return is staggering and key to a multitude of exciting investigations,” said Dominic Benford, Roman program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

The winning trio of the survey

Using the Wide Field instrument, Roman will conduct three primary investigations that will represent 75% of the primary mission. The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will combine the powers of imaging and spectroscopy to reveal more than a billion galaxies spread across a wide swath of space and time. Astronomers will trace the evolution of the universe to probe dark matter – invisible matter detectable only by how its gravity affects things we can see – and trace the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters over time.

The high-latitude time domain survey will probe our dynamic universe by observing the same region of the cosmos repeatedly. Assembling these observations to create films will allow scientists to study how celestial objects and phenomena change over days or even years. This will help astronomers study dark energy – the mysterious cosmic pressure believed to accelerate the expansion of the universe – and could even uncover entirely new phenomena that we don’t yet know how to look for.

Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will peer inside to provide one of the deepest views ever of the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Astronomers will observe hundreds of millions of stars for microlensing signals – gravitational increases in a background star’s light caused by the gravity of an intervening object. While astronomers have primarily discovered worlds close to stars, Roman’s microlensing observations can find planets in their star’s habitable zone and farther away, including worlds like all the planets in our solar system except Mercury. Microlensing will also reveal rogue planets – worlds that roam the galaxy without being attached to a star – and isolated black holes. The same data set will reveal 100,000 worlds that transit or pass in front of their host stars.

The remaining 25 percent of Roman’s five-year primary mission will be devoted to other observations that will be determined with input from the broader scientific community. The first such program, called Galactic Plane Survey, has already been selected.

Since Roman’s observations will enable a very wide range of scientific studies, the mission will have a general investigation program designed to help astronomers reveal scientific discoveries using Roman data. As part of NASA’s commitment to Gold Standard Science, NASA will make all of Roman’s data public with no period of exclusive use. This ensures that multiple scientists and teams can use the data at the same time, which is important since each Roman observation will address a multitude of scientific cases.

Roman’s namesake – Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer – made it her personal mission to make cosmic views easily accessible to everyone by paving the way for space-based telescopes.

“The mission will acquire enormous quantities of astronomical images that will enable scientists to make groundbreaking discoveries for decades to come, honoring Dr. Roman’s legacy of promoting scientific tools for the broader community,” said Jackie Townsend, Roman’s deputy project manager at NASA Goddard. “I like to think that Dr. Roman would be extremely proud of his namesake telescope and excited to see what mysteries he discovers in the years to come.”

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is operated at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute; and a scientific team composed of scientists from various research institutions. Key industry partners include BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.

To learn more about the Roman Space Telescope, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/roman

By Ashley Balzer
NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterGreenbelt, Maryland.

Media contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterGreenbelt, Maryland.
301-286-1940