NASA launched its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, sending the observatory on its journey to Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, about 1 million miles from Earth. The mission lifted off ahead of its original timeline after development finished sooner than planned, and the telescope is expected to begin science operations after months of calibration, with first images due in early 2027.
Roman is NASA’s next flagship observatory after Hubble and Webb and is built for wide-field infrared surveys of dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets. Its much larger field of view than Hubble’s makes it a major survey instrument for astronomy and for building a statistical census of planetary systems similar to our own. The mission has a five-year prime plan and could be extended, with budget estimates around $4.3 billion.
The telescope has now started cruise operations toward its final orbit, where it will operate at L2 alongside other deep-space observatories. The launch also keeps NASA on track to expand its next-generation astrophysics programme with a spacecraft designed to study faint and distant objects on a far broader scale than earlier flagship missions.