A New Perspective - The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope

An artist's rendering of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, our newest eye in the sky.

We’re about to get a whole new perspective of the universe. On August 30, 2026, NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the newest telescope in a lineage including Hubble and Webb. With its specialized design and new technology, the Roman Telescope is poised to change the way we view the cosmos.

What is the Roman Space Telescope?

Dr. Nancy Roman, the Mother of Hubble and eponym of the Roman Space Telescope.

The telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy. She worked with NASA in the 1960s and 1970s, where she virtually created NASA’s space astronomy program. Her leadership led directly to the construction and launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, earning her the nickname “Mother of Hubble.” Her lasting legacy includes every other telescope NASA put into space. As she passed away in 2018, during the construction of the telescope, it only seemed fitting to name the newest space telescope in her honor.

The Roman Telescope’s specialty will be wide-field views in the optical to near-infrared spectrum, meaning it can see some of the visible light that a human can see, as well as infrared light, which is invisible to a human, giving it an even broader view of the universe. Both Hubble and Webb were designed to look at targeted objects, whereas Roman can view expansive regions of the sky up to 200 times larger, while still capturing individual objects with the same resolution as Hubble. This allows Roman to take in far more observations at once than was previously possible, without sacrificing any quality. A single wide-field image from Roman will have a 24,576x12,288 pixel resolution. To display such an image with native resolution would take 36 different 4k screens stacked in a 6x6 grid.

In just its first five years of operation, Roman will be able to capture 50 times the amount of sky in imagery than Hubble was able to in 30 years. Also in those 5 years, it will have the ability to complete surveys of the sky that would have taken Hubble hundreds, if not thousands of years. By simply having a wider field of view, the telescope will be able to pick up far more data at any one time than our other telescopes. But even with this advantage, Roman still doesn’t replace Hubble or Webb. Rather, it complements them. Once Roman has found an interesting target, there are still studies that can only be done with the specific, more targeted, technology of Hubble and Webb. This frees Hubble and Webb from the need to scout locations to image, so more time can be spent on dedicated observations.

Roman's hypothetical field of view compared to Hubble's. Where Hubble can only see the specific "Pillars of Creation" structure in a single frame, Roman will be able to see much more of the entire Eagle Nebula surrounding it, without sacrificing the image quality of the famous pillar structures.

With such large and high quality images, the Roman Telescope is going to be generating a lot of data. Every day, the telescope will send 1.4 terabytes of raw data back to Earth. That’s almost enough to max out the hard drive of an average gaming computer. Over the course of its initial five-year mission, it’s expected to send back a total of 20 petabytes of data. That’s the equivalent of streaming 10,000,000 HD movies, which would take about 760 years to watch.

Roman's Missions

Another unique feature of the telescope is its coronagraph. One of the primary missions of Roman will be to hunt for new exoplanets—planets that exist around other stars. In addition to all the traditional methods of hunting for exoplanets, Roman’s coronagraph will give it a special advantage. The coronagraph allows the telescope to block the light from an individual star, allowing it to directly image exoplanets that would otherwise be difficult to spot. Taking a picture of an exoplanet directly is tricky, as the light from the star will almost always drown out the far fainter and smaller planet. But by blocking the light from the star before taking the picture, planets become far easier to spot. For the first time, we’ll be able to directly image planets the size of Jupiter in a Jupiter-like orbit, a massive step up from our current abilities.

In addition to hunting planets, Roman has several other mission goals, most of which relate to helping us better understand the universe. By studying the expansion of the universe in more clear detail than ever before, Roman will be able to give us new insights into one of the greatest cosmic mysteries of all: dark energy. We don’t know what dark energy is, but we know it exists. The universe, as far as we can tell, has been accelerating in its expansion, and we have no idea why. There has to be some sort of force causing this to happen. We call this unknown force dark energy. A wider view of the universe means a greater understanding of how it expands, and a greater understanding of its expansion might just mean a greater understanding of the mysterious dark energy.

Similarly, the universe seems to be missing mass. We know it must exist, based on gravitational interactions that we can see, but we can’t see the missing mass directly. We call this missing mass dark matter. Like dark energy, we know it exists thanks to its impact on the universe, but we have no idea what it actually is. By studying the large scale structure of the universe with the Roman Telescope, we hope to one day better understand the nature of this dark matter.

After its planned launch on August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will begin its voyage towards its new home, the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, a spot in our Solar System where the gravity of Earth and the Sun combine in just such a way to keep objects orbiting there moving around the Sun at the same speed as Earth. This allows the telescope to more efficiently remain in one place. It will take roughly 30 days for the spacecraft to travel the 1.5 million kilometers to its destination. Once there, the telescope will spend over three months preparing itself to begin its mission, so we can expect the first images from this groundbreaking telescope to arrive in early 2027.