NASA’s newest telescope is officially on its way to deep space after more than a decade of development and high anticipation. Onboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 A.M. EDT on August 30.
The telescope is set to transform our understanding of the cosmos—from the furthest reaches and most mysterious forces to the planets and stars that make up our own galaxy and even objects in our solar system.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said at a postlaunch press conference that all systems appear nominal after launch. In the next weeks, the telescope’s instruments will be calibrated and turned on as it travels to its point in space.
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“The telescope will provide a vast new atlas of the universe,” Isaacman said. “This is a massive accomplishment and proof of what a truly focused NASA science team is capable of accomplishing.”
The Roman Telescope will conduct its science observations from a perch at the second sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, a location some million miles “behind” our planet where the sun’s and Earth’s gravitational pulls balance each other out. The effect essentially gives Roman a parking spot in space, enabling engineers on Earth to remain in constant contact with the telescope while making sure our planet never blocks its view of the cosmos.
“Roman is poised to conduct extraordinary surveys that will impact every area of astronomy,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, at a press conference ahead of the launch on Saturday.
“We’ll perform a revolutionary census of planets around other stars and may confirm that our standard model of the universe is incorrect and put us on the path to figuring out what is right,” she added.
With an initial science mission lasting five years, Roman will join NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope in revealing the universe in ways we have never seen before. Among the secrets Roman will probe is the nature of dark energy and dark matter. Astronomers believe dark energy fuels the universe’s expansion, but its fundamental nature—is it constant, or is it changing?—is a mystery. Dark matter, meanwhile, is thought to be the glue that holds galaxies and other massive structures in the universe together, but again, its nature is an enigma, and its existence remains unproven.
The telescope’s main survey will take more than a year, McEnery said at the Saturday press event—and its scale is incomparable. “We would need over half a million 4K TVs to fully display the single Roman image from our largest survey,” she said.
McEnery said that she expects that Roman’s most exciting observations will be entirely unpredictable. “We’ll find new things that go bump in the night,” she said.
Roman is also outfitted with a special instrument called a coronagraph, which will enable the telescope to observe exoplanets with unprecedented sensitivity. “We think that we will be capable of detecting exoplanets that are about 100 million times fainter than their stars,” says Vanessa Bailey, Roman coronagraph instrument scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
At the postlaunch press conference, Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said Roman could increase the number of known exoplanets from some 6,000 to 100,000.
“One of our main goals at NASA is answering the question: Are we alone in the universe?” Fox said. “Is there another Earth 2.0 looking back at me? And with Roman, we are going to make this giant leap forward with the coronagraph technology that is going to allow us to look at these distant, distant worlds and start to really resolve the atmosphere around them to let us know: Could they be habitable?”
We will need to wait some time before we get the first observations from Roman, however. After the telescope reaches L2, it will need go through a series of commissioning operations to fully come online. NASA expects its first images will be released early next year.
Editor’s Note (8/30/26): This is a developing story and may be updated.