Scheduled for September Launch, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Will Unveil the Dark Universe Like Never Before

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will begin its groundbreaking mission in September

Ahead of schedule and under budget, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch in early September. Mission aims to map the universe in unprecedented detail

By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings

GREENBELT, Md.—On Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman saw a early September launch window for Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope– a multibillion-dollar “flagship”-class observatory, ready to probe the accelerating expansion of the universe and map large numbers of planets, stars and distant galaxies.

“Roman will give Earth a new atlas of the universe,” Isaacman said during a news conference at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Behind him stood the completed space telescope, measuring more than 42 feet high and 14 feet wide in a test bay of a cavernous white room at Goddard. “What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year,” he said, referring to the space agency’s aging but active Hubble Space Telescope.

The new telescope’s mirror is the same size as Hubble’s but offers a more panoramic field of view, so wide in fact that no screen currently exists can display a single Roman image in full resolution. (Romain’s name is for former NASA chief astronomerwho is often considered the “mother of Hubble” for her critical work launching this iconic telescope.)

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THE A $4.3 billion spaceship will be shipped in mid-June to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations. Unusually for the space agency, which has seen many of its biggest science missions suffer delays and exorbitant costs, Roman is months ahead of schedule and under budget. After carrying out space vacuum and temperature tests, the observatory only has a few tests left. These involve the deployment process in which the antennas will be deployed into space, says NASA’s Jackie Townsend, Roman’s deputy project manager, as well as minor tasks such as small repairs to a few solar panels. Once these are completed, Roman will be packaged for shipping and will ultimately launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in September.

Astronomers have so far cataloged about 6,000 planets orbiting nearby stars, noted Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during the briefing event. During its five-year primary mission, Roman is expected to discover tens of thousands of new planets, she said, as well as billions of galaxies and tens of billions of stars. But what excites astrophysicists most is Roman’s potential to answer some of their biggest questions about the universe itself.

“Observations suggest that our standard model of the universe is incorrect,” said Julie McEnry, lead scientist on NASA’s telescope project, highlighting the open astrophysical questions of dark matter holding many galaxies together and “dark energy“fueling their expansion of each other at an increasing rate—cosmological enigmas that have remained unsolved for decades. By probing the structure and distribution of galaxies throughout cosmic history, “we will also study how the universe itself has expanded over time,” McEnry said. “These are the keys to discovering the fundamental nature of dark matter and dark energy.”

Roman’s studies will be a vital complement to other large telescopes pursuing these cosmic mysteries. Such instruments include the Mission Euclid and the ground Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

In 2012, while NASA had difficulty with the development of his James Webb space telescope (which subsequently launched in 2021), the United States National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency, donated two surplus wide field telescopes and optics at the space agency. This kicked off the development of what became the Roman Telescope, which previously had the cumbersome name WFIRST (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope) based on a 2010 telescope. astronomy panel report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine who recommended its creation. However, it would be “wrong” to assume that the donation from the spy agency allowed Roman to stay on schedule and on budget, says Jamie Dunn, project manager for Roman, in response to a question from Scientific American. Adapting donated hardware to NASA’s needs “has posed its own challenges,” he says. “That didn’t make it easy.”

This is partly why, rather than following a direct, smooth path to the launch pad, Roman endured years of a strict budget “cap” for financing the project. This tied future congressional appropriations to key milestones that Roman’s development would be expected to achieve in terms of timing and budget execution. According to Townsend, the guarantee of future money allowed NASA to “de-risk” various new technologies without fear of budget cuts and led to constant work on its development.

Last year, Roman survived a White House proposal to cancel the mission, thanks to Congress maintains funding. At Goddard’s press conference Tuesday, Isaacman said the agency would look to the mission for “lessons learned” when building future flagship missions. (He offered no response to questions about the latest White House budget, which calls for for clean cuts to NASA science and referred to a congressional committee Appropriations hearing Wednesday.)

Equipped with a 7.9-foot-wide main telescope mirror, Roman’s surveying capabilities are more than 1,000 times faster than those of the famous Hubble Space Telescope, Isaacman noted, and can capture 200 times more of the sky in a single image. Once Roman is launched, the first 45 days of its mission will consist of deploying its solar panel and antennas. The next 45 days will be spent calibrating its optics, which include a first-of-its-kind high-contrast coronagraph designed to block starlight to reveal otherwise hidden orbiting planets.

Much like Roman himself, whose cost and schedule overruns are paving the way for even bigger projects, this coronagraph is a crucial demonstration for NASA’s next ambitious flagship: the Habitable Worlds Observatorywhich will seek to image Earth-like planets around nearby stars.

“We sincerely hope, and actually expect, that the most exciting science in Roman will be about the things that we didn’t expect, that we couldn’t predict, that will pose profound questions for future missions,” McEnry said.