By BlueShift | 2026-04-30

NASA has moved forward the launch date for its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and is now targeting early September of this year.

Moving up the US space agency's previously stated commitment to a launch by May 2027, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman described the project as "eight months ahead of schedule and under budget" in an April 21 post on X.

"Roman will help answer some of the biggest questions in science, investigating dark matter, dark energy, and the structure of the universe," Isaacman said.

"Its images will be so large and detailed, there isn’t a screen in existence big enough to display them."

Dark matter and dark energy are thought to constitute 95% of our universe. Dark matter is believed to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy pulls them apart by making the universe expand faster over time.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is managing the telescope, with input from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and various scientists and research institutions.

The 12-meter (39-foot) telescope is expected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Once operational, it will have a field of view at least 100 times larger than that of the agency's Hubble Space Telescope, "potentially measuring light from a billion galaxies in its lifetime," according to NASA.

"This observatory will also be able to block starlight to directly see exoplanets and planet-forming disks," the agency said.

It will be able to "complete a statistical census of planetary systems in our galaxy, and settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics."

The telescope is expected to amass a 20,000-terabyte data archive during its initial five-year mission that scientists will be able to use to identify and study stars, galaxies and other astronomical phenomena.

From its position 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) from Earth, the Roman telescope will sweep across vast regions of space, sending back 11 terabytes of data a day, said Goddard Space Flight Center systems engineer Mark Melton.

"In the first year, we'll have sent down more data than Hubble will have for its entire life," he told AFP.

'A new atlas of the universe'

"Roman’s accelerated development is a true success story of what we can achieve when public investment, institutional expertise, and private enterprise come together," Isaacman said during an April 21 briefing at Goddard.

He credited NASA and its industry partners with "more than a decade of dedication and millions of hours of work" to bring the telescope to this point.

The $4 billion telescope is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman.

Known as the "mother of the Hubble Space Telescope," Roman was born May 16, 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee, and died December 25, 2018.

She was NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, and held various other positions at the agency. One of the biggest challenges of her career was getting the Hubble Space Telescope approved by the US Congress.

Thirty-six years after Hubble launched, revolutionizing astronomical observations, NASA hopes the Roman telescope will help to shed light on questions that remain unresolved.

"Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe," Isaacman said.

The telescope's wide-angle lens will allow NASA to conduct a census of the objects that make up our universe, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

This wealth of information will enable NASA to tease out areas of interest that can then be investigated by complementary telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.

Thanks to its infrared vision, the telescope will be able to observe light emitted by celestial bodies billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time to hopefully discover more about the two phenomena.

The Roman telescope will complement the work of Europe's Euclid space telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, Michigan State University assistant professor of physics and astronomy Darryl Seligman told AFP.

It will probe "how the dark matter structures itself throughout cosmic time," he said, and "calculate how fast galaxies are moving away from us."

These discoveries could fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of the universe, said astrophysicist Julie McEnery, who led the Roman project.