The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is all set to launch one of its most powerful telescopes to date on Sunday, August 30, 2026. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. The telescope will take 90 days to travel 1 million miles from Earth before engineers can begin inspecting its instruments. Therefore, space enthusiasts expecting to see photos from Roman will have to wait until next year.
The new telescope will work differently from the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, which are already in space, because it features a Wide Field Instrument that helps it see an area of the sky roughly 100 times larger than Hubble's, allowing it to survey huge sections of the universe much faster. Scientists expect Roman to map billions of galaxies and help investigate some of the biggest questions in modern astronomy, including dark energy, dark matter, and how the universe has changed over time.
It will also search for exoplanets, including worlds that are difficult to detect with other telescopes. The telescope uses a 2.4-meter primary mirror originally designed for U.S. spy satellites before it was given to NASA. The mirror is roughly the same size as Hubble's, but Roman is designed to cover a much wider patch of sky at once. NASA expects the telescope's primary mission to last at least five years.