Ready for Roman: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Article June 6, 2026
An artist’s illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
An artist’s illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Well, it’s official! NASA’s next Great Observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has a launch date. We know exactly when Roman will ride a SpaceX Falcon Heavy into space, heading for the Sun-Earth L2 point. There it will join such notable contemporaries as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Euclid Telescope, as it prepares to open its eyes and begin its mission.

I’ve been excited for this telescope for a long time, so having a launch date for it is a big deal! So what is this telescope and why is it worth getting excited over? Let’s meet the Roman Telescope, the amazing woman it’s named for, and find out how soon we’ll get to see this baby fly.

 

Nancy Grace Roman

Y’all…this lady was cool. Like, seriously cool. Borin in 1925, Nance Grace Roman had already formed her own astronomy club at the age of 11. She graduated early from high school and headed to Swarthmore College to study astronomy, where she was told by the dean that, as a woman, she really shouldn’t bother. The head of the Swarthmore astronomy department, Peter van de Kamp, was apparently initially not thrilled at having this young woman in his class, but seems to have come around by the time he recommended she continue her studies after graduation in 1946. Only three years later, in 1949, she had her PhD from the University of Chicago, despite working with a professor who spent six months refusing to speak to her.

Nancy Grace Roman, seen here in the early 1970s, served as NASA’s first Chief Astronomer. Credit: NASA/ESA
Nancy Grace Roman, seen here in the early 1970s, served as NASA’s first Chief Astronomer. Credit: NASA/ESA

In the 1950s she wound up at the Naval Research Laboratory on the recommendation of no less then Gerard Kuiper (who would go on to get an entire section of the solar system named after him and would also eventually include among his mentees a promising young scientist named Carl Sagan), where she became a pioneer in radio astronomy. And by early 1959 she had been invited to the fledgling organization that had only recently been re-dubbed NASA to create its astronomy program from the ground up. 

She remained the astronomy chief at NASA until her retirement 21 years later, and the list of her accomplishments is long, too long for me to do justice to here. I will call out one particularly notable accomplishment on her resume though. During her tenure she became a major mover on a proposed project called the Large Space Telescope. As part of her mission to make this project a reality she helped create the Space Telescope Science Institute, which today operates both Hubble and Webb. The LST project eventually turned into the Hubble Space Telescope, earning Roman her oft-quoted nickname, the “Mother of Hubble”.

If anybody deserves to have a premiere space observatory named after them, it’s this incredible lady.

 

Free to a Good Home: One Telescope Mirror

The idea of the observatory that will be the Roman Telescope was first floated around 2011, under the name of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). Then in 2012 something remarkable happened that helped make it feel more possible. The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA with an odd proposal. They had, for…reasons, a pair of Hubble-class telescope mirrors that they had commissioned and, for…reasons, were not actually going to use. Did NASA want them, by any chance?

The mirror at the heart of the Roman Telescope, seen here under construction, was a gift to NASA from the National Reconnaissance Office. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
The mirror at the heart of the Roman Telescope, seen here under construction, was a gift to NASA from the National Reconnaissance Office. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

Never one to look a gift horse (or telescope mirror) in the mouth, NASA said yes, and pretty quickly allotted one of those mirrors for the WFIRST project (the other is still sitting in storage). So the 8-ft (2.4-m) mirror that sits at Roman’s heart was originally a completely unexpected gift from the NRO. It doesn’t get much more random than that. 

By 2018 a contract for constructing WFIRST had been granted. In 2020 WFIRST was officially renamed for Nancy Grace Roman, and by 2025 work on it was considered so critical to NASA’s mission that it continued even during the government shutdown (construction having been slowed by the 2020 pandemic). In November 2025 the telescope was declared complete—well ahead of its scheduled May 2027 launch.

 

Looking at Things a New Way

Roman is a new kind of space observatory. It has a mirror the same size as Hubble’s, but it’s not like Hubble at all. It seen in infrared like Webb, but it’s not really like Webb either. If anything, it’s more like if Hubble and Webb had a baby and then fed it steroids. It’s a first-of-its-kind.

Hubble, Roman, and Webb are very different beasts, despite all being premiere space observatories. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Hubble, Roman, and Webb are very different beasts, despite all being premiere space observatories. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Essentially what it will do is listed in its original name: it will be an infrared telescope with a wide field of view designed for efficient but sharp sky surveys. To break that down, it will be able to see a lot of the sky at once, that’s the wide-field part. Hubble and Webb, for instance, are designed to provide incredibly sharp views of a very, very tiny piece of sky. Roman will be able to provide a view that is just as sharp over an area of sky 100 times as large as its fellow Great Observatories.

That means in a single glance Roman will be able to see look at a patch of sky larger than the Full Moon but see that entire patch with the same level of magnification and resolution that Hubble can manage. That means that in Roman’s first five years it will be able to survey over 50 times as much sky as Hubble has managed to do in over 30 years, with the same level of magnification. It’s a “big picture” observatory. 

Being out at L2 like Webb also allows it to avoid certain limitations that Hubble, trapped in Earth orbit, has to deal with. Namely, Earth is big, and when you’re in Earth orbit it’s blocking a huge chunk of sky at any given time. It also means that Roman will have long, uninterrupted chunks of time to view any target areas it’s focused on, unlike Hubble which is zipping around Earth once every 90 minutes.

Being an infrared telescope, like Webb, means that Roman also benefits from being away from the Earth and Moon, which glow brightly in the infrared. But don’t think that just because Roman and Webb are both infrared telescopes that they’re stepping on each other’s toes. Their wavelength ranges do overlap, but Roman will be focused on the shorter end (0.5-2.3 microns for those interested) of the very long range of infrared wavelengths that Webb is able to see (0.6-28.5 microns). Think of our Great Observatories more like a collaborative team than competition.

 

Ahead of the Game

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, seen here fully complete, was finished well ahead of schedule. Credit: NASA/Scott Wiessinger
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, seen here fully complete, was finished well ahead of schedule. Credit: NASA/Scott Wiessinger

There’s already plenty here for a space nerd to revel in: a first-of-its-kind space observatory that is built around a mysteriously-gifted mirror from a notorious spy agency and is going to provide absolutely insane views of the universe (I’m already preparing new spots in my desktop slideshow of amazing space pics on my work laptop). And it even finished construction well ahead of schedule! Now if only we didn’t have to wait a full year, until May 2027, for it to launch. 

Psych! Roman finished construction so far ahead of schedule (despite COVID-related delays and several White House budget requests that proposed to cut the mission’s funding completely. Fortunately Congress, the body that actually sets NASA’s budget, never went for that idea), that the launch has been moved up. By a lot.

That May 2027 launch is now going to happen on August 30, 2026, in less than three months! It’s supposed to get a 90-day commissioning period (though I’ve also seen speculation that it could very well start getting to work even before it arrives at L2 if things are looking good), and the first science operations are due to begin in January.

This infographic outlines some of the surveys the Roman Telescope will undertake. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
This infographic outlines some of the surveys the Roman Telescope will undertake. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

That means we’re very likely to get our First Look images from Roman (ala Webb in July 2022 or Rubin in June 2025) before Christmas, maybe even before Thanksgiving (which, for anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with American Thanksgiving, is in late November), as much as six months before it was even supposed to launch!

Roman is approved for a five-year observing mission, but is estimated to have enough fuel to last it for a decade, so something tells me we’re going to be feasting on images and data from this observatory for years to come. I’ve been waiting for this mission since back in its WFIRST days, and I can’t believe I’m going to get it early. That never happens! 

But you know what they say: never say never! And if anything was going to be the exception to the rule, it would be the Roman Telescope. Nancy Grace Roman herself would probably have it no other way.