NASA recently released the first photos of the newly constructed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The telescope could soon help researchers search for exoplanets, map the Milky Way, and unravel some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, such as the identity of dark matter.
Experts also revealed the most likely launch date for the next-generation spacecraft, confirming that it is likely to launch ahead of schedule and could begin collecting data by the end of 2026.
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A new photo released on Dec. 4 shows Roman standing upright in a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope is approximately 42 feet (12.7 meters) tall and weighs 9,184 pounds (4,166 kilograms). Construction began in February 2016, and the project has so far stayed within its original budget of $4.3 billion, researchers said.
Once launched, Roman will be located approximately 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth at a Lagrangian point (a fixed point relative to Earth where the gravity of two objects cancels out). That particular Lagrangian point will be Sun-Earth L2, where JWST and the European Space Agency’s Gaia and Euclidean Space Telescopes are already located.
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“The completion of the Rome Observatory marks a defining moment for NASA,” NASA Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said in a statement. “Innovative science relies on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered observatories that further expand our understanding of the universe, test by test.”
“With the completion of Roman’s construction, we are on the brink of immense scientific discovery,” Julie McEnery, a NASA Goddard astrophysicist and Roman’s senior project scientist, said in a statement. “More than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies are expected to be revealed during the first five years of this mission.”
What about romance?
Roman is equipped with two important pieces of equipment that will define its purpose throughout its first five years of mission. (Roman may still be operational in five years, but researchers are only planning until then.)
The first is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), a 288-megapixel camera mounted on a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) mirror that can take high-resolution pictures of the outer reaches of our solar system, the edges of the visible universe, and everything in between in infrared light too faint to be seen by the human eye.
One of Roman’s main goals will be to create the most detailed map of the Milky Way’s center in any galactic plane survey to date, which will take up at least 25 percent of the total observation time. But it will also scour the wide universe in search of things like distant galaxy clusters and giant “cosmic cavities” that could help uncover the true nature of dark matter and dark energy, NASA recently announced.
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But the telescope’s secret weapon is likely a colonograph device that blocks light from distant stars, allowing WFI to take pictures of surrounding exoplanets that would normally be obscured by the star’s glare.
As of September 2025, scientists have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets in about 30 years. But Roman is expected to discover more than 15 times that number within six months, a huge boon for scientists exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
“The question ‘Are we alone?’ is a big challenge, and building tools to help answer it is an equally big challenge,” Feng Zhao, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and manager of the Rome Coronagraph Instrument, said in a statement. This device “could bring us one step closer to that goal,” Zhao added.
In total, Roman is expected to collect more than 20,000 terabytes of data during its first five-year mission, which is equivalent to the storage capacity of about 3,000 iPhones. “The sheer volume of data Roman will return is mind-boggling,” Dominic Benford, a NASA researcher and Roman’s program scientist, said in a statement.
When will Roman be released?
For years, Roman’s launch date has been given as May 2027, but some are predicting that this date will be pushed back, as has been the case with other NASA missions. For example, JWST was originally scheduled to launch in 2014, according to the Planetary Society.
But early last year, rumors began to spread that Roman might not only meet the deadline, but actually launch early.
And on January 5, at the 247th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, Arizona, project scientists confirmed these rumors to be true, revealing that Roman’s earliest launch date is currently September 28, Space News reported.
Roman will be launched aboard one of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rockets from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, requiring transport more than 900 miles (1,450 km) from Goddard before liftoff. This is expected to happen in June, and depending on whether this happens as planned will give us a better indication of how likely a September release date actually is.
Once Roman arrives in orbit, mission scientists will have about 90 days to take the necessary steps to begin collecting data, according to NASA. Therefore, if the telescope were launched on September 28th, data collection would likely begin around December 27th.
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