The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope successfully launched this week on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Deployment went smoothly, and the craft is operating nominally and talking to NASA.
Roman will travel to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, where it will use two instruments — the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument — to search for exoplanets, dark energy, and other astrophysical phenomena. The WFI will capture images with the same resolution and clarity as Hubble, but has a * 100x * larger field of view, and the Coronagraph will allow the telescope to detect and see exoplanets better than any telescope in operation.
When it arrives at its L2 orbit, testing and calibration will begin. Expect the first real images in early 2027.
The telescope is amed for Nancy Grace Roman, an astronomer and NASA’s very first Chief of Astronomy in the 60s and 70s. Among many other achievements, she is responsible for getting Hubble off the ground-- not literally off the ground and into space, of course, but championing the project and driving the early planning of it.
Launch image credit: Andrew McCarthy (https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/2094042714580951147). Other images credit: NASA.
