NASA Roman’s Planet Imager Has Powered On (News Release - September 1)
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully activated the mission’s Coronagraph Instrument, which will block starlight to view planets and dusty disks around nearby stars. Now the instrument will undergo a months-long series of calibrations and tests prior to beginning full science operations.
The coronagraph power-on began at 7:27 a.m. EDT and was completed at 8:22 a.m. on September 1.
The Roman Coronagraph is a system of optics, masks, self-flexing mirrors, and sensors designed to demonstrate the most advanced technologies ever flown in space for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from stars and make it possible for scientists to see the faint reflected light from planets in orbit around them.
Using the coronagraph, scientists will photograph worlds and dusty disks in visible light to help us see giant planets that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far. The Roman coronagraph team will conduct a series of pre-planned observations for a total of three months spread across the mission’s first year-and-a-half of operations.
In addition to direct imaging, Roman will also find planets via the microlensing and transit methods. Read more about the wide array of worlds that Roman will study here.
To learn more about Roman’s commissioning process, visit:
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
NASA Roman Space Telescope’s Antenna, ‘Visor’ Deployed (News Release)
Roman’s antenna and visor-like sunshade have successfully deployed.
Roman will downlink the highest data volume of any NASA astrophysics mission so far via its high-gain antenna, which measures 5.6 feet wide yet only weighs 24 pounds. It’s made of a carbon composite material that weighs very little but will still withstand the spacecraft’s wide temperature fluctuations. Its large size will help Roman send radio signals across a million miles of intervening space to Earth.
At one frequency, the dual-band antenna will receive commands and send back information about the spacecraft’s health and location. It will use another frequency to transmit a deluge of data at up to 500 megabits per second to ground stations in New Mexico, Australia and Japan. These locations are spread out so the Roman team will consistently be able to communicate with the spacecraft.
The antenna deployment lasted about 4 minutes and concluded at 2:03 p.m. EDT on August 31.
The deployable aperture cover, which is a large sunshade designed to keep unwanted light out of the telescope, was released next. It deployed via three booms that were triggered electronically to spring upward. It lasted about 8 minutes and was successfully completed at 6:05 a.m. EDT on September 1.
Roman’s next major milestone is the Coronagraph Instrument activation. In a couple of weeks, the Wide Field Instrument will power on. Both instruments will run through a series of calibrations and tests throughout the rest of Roman’s three-month commissioning period.
NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images by early 2027.
To learn more about Roman’s commissioning process, visit:
NASA’s Roman Completes First Mid-Course Correction Burn (News Release)
At 12:02 p.m. EDT, Roman began an approximately 3-minute mid-course correction burn to adjust its trajectory toward its final orbit.
It’s the first of two planned orbit adjustments to keep Roman on course for the second Lagrange point, L2. The other, if needed, is planned for later this week, and Roman’s orbital insertion will take place approximately 100 days post-launch. Once in orbit around L2, Roman will only require periodic station-keeping burns roughly every 28 days.
Trace Roman’s path here, and follow along with the blog for further updates.
To learn more about Roman’s commissioning process, visit:
NASA’s Dark Universe-Seeking Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launches (News Release)
Now on a three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon reveal the Universe’s darkest secrets. The mission launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Roman pairs a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to explore vast swaths of the sky and probe deeply into cosmic history. This flagship mission will help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and worlds outside of our Solar System, known as exoplanets. Its surveys will support a broad range of research extending far beyond the mission’s main science goals.
“Roman is exactly the kind of success story we want to see across NASA,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Delivered ahead of schedule and on budget, this mission reflects more than a decade of dedication from the NASA workforce and our industry partners. Now, Roman will give us a new atlas of the Universe, push the boundaries of discovery, and demonstrate what is possible when America’s space program pairs bold ambition with disciplined execution.”
The ground control team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began receiving telemetry data from Roman seven minutes after launch. The Falcon Heavy rocket performed as expected, separating from the observatory 31 minutes into the flight. After separating from the center core, the rocket’s boosters safely returned to the launch site for refurbishment.
“Roman will be a discovery machine that will bring us closer than ever before to answering humanity’s most profound questions about our cosmic history,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With its large field of view and fast survey speeds, Roman will usher us into a new era of discovery and make the invisible visible, setting the foundation for humanity’s search for life beyond our Solar System.”
During launch and early orbit, Roman uses the Near Space Network’s ground stations and relay satellites to exchange tracking, telemetry and command data with ground controllers. About 70 minutes after launch, the Deep Space Network takes over communications and guides Roman towards the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth. Roman connects to that network through the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia first.
Approximately six hours later the data relay will transfer to the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex in Spain and then to the Goldstone Deep Space Communication Complex in California, ensuring continuous contact with Roman throughout its journey.
The Roman team also confirmed successful deployment of the observatory’s solar panels and lower instrument sun shade an hour and 23 minutes after launch. Within the upcoming days, Roman’s high-gain antenna and visor-like deployable aperture cover will deploy, ground controllers will initiate the first of two-mid-course corrections, and the Coronagraph Instrument will power on. This instrument will demonstrate the technology that future missions like NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory concept could use to image Earth-like planets in the search for life in the Universe.
Roman’s Coronagraph will take a giant step in that direction by snapping pictures of Jupiter-like planets.
A few weeks into Roman’s voyage, its primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument, will activate. This 300-megapixel infrared camera has 18 4K detectors, each about the size of a saltine cracker. These detectors collect photons of light that will be decoded into crisp cosmic panoramas.
Thanks to the observatory’s rigid design and stable optical performance, it will rapidly scan the sky without needing substantial time between separate observations. The Roman telescope is designed to survey the Universe a thousand times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Throughout the rest of Roman’s three-month commissioning period, scientists will run the instruments through a series of calibrations and tests. NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images by early 2027.
Roman will send back 1.4 terabytes of data every day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission, so far. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and citizen scientists will help sift through it and flag significant findings, which astronomers can then study.
“We’ve never been able to view the Universe with eyes like Roman’s before,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. “There’s no telling what more we’ll know and have seen by this time next year.”
Roman is the fourth primary mission that NASA has launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Earlier this year, the agency’s Launch Services Program worked with SpaceX to accelerate the launch date to accommodate the space telescope’s early completion.
The telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a team of scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc., L3Harris Technologies, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging. Contributions to Roman are also made by ESA, JAXA, the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
Roman Space Telescope Transport from PHSF to LC-39A (Photo Release - August 25)
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, encapsulated in its payload fairing, travels from the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility to the SpaceX hangar at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, ahead of mating to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
Roman’s science instruments are designed to help researchers understand dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the Universe’s expansion. The observatory will also map how galaxies form, cluster and evolve by tracing the influence of dark matter.
Liftoff from NASA Kennedy is targeted for no earlier than Sunday, August 30, 2026.
Roman Space Telescope Encapsulation (Photo Release - August 21)
Teams inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida encapsulate the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope within the payload fairing on Friday, August 21, 2026, ahead of mating to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
Encapsulation shields the spacecraft during rollout, ascent, and the early phases of flight.
Roman will investigate dark energy and dark matter, conduct a statistical census of planetary systems, and enable a broad range of additional astrophysics research.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy is targeted for no earlier than Sunday, August 30, 2026.
Launch Dress Rehearsal Complete Ahead of NASA Roman Space Telescope Liftoff (News Release)
The team preparing to launch NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope completed a mission dress rehearsal on Thursday from Florida’s space coast.
During the exercise, Roman teams ran through a full end-to-end simulation of launch-day operations leading up to liftoff. They practiced powering up the spacecraft, simulated fueling operations for the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, conducted mock weather briefings, and practiced troubleshooting a variety of scenarios.
This rehearsal is a standard part of preparation and contributes to mission success, especially since NASA missions often involve unique requirements specific to a given spacecraft. During the simulation, the team was on console at NASA and SpaceX facilities at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and SpaceX facilities at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center, where they tested and demonstrated proficiency on everything from communications to mission systems.
Completing the rehearsal brings the team one step closer to sending Roman on its mission to address essential questions about dark energy, planets outside our Solar System, and infrared astrophysics. By conducting wide-field surveys, the telescope will explore the Universe’s structure, evolution and composition.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting launch no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, August 30, from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
NASA’s Roman Telescope to Carry 1.35 Million Names to Deep Space (News Release)
On July 27, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The names were submitted by people globally, including astronauts from Artemis II and Artemis III. The memory card will travel with the Roman observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, about one million miles from Earth, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balance out.
Roman is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of the agency’s modern science program. Roman championed space-based observatories that could study the Universe from above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting launch for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, August 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.
NASA Fuels Roman Space Telescope for Late August Launch (News Release)
Technicians completed fueling NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, bringing it an important step closer to launch. On July 25, the team completed operations that carefully loaded 290 gallons of hydrazine fuel into the observatory at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
After launch and separation from the rocket, Roman will use this onboard propellant to perform maneuvers as it travels to Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, located about one million miles from Earth. There, about four times the distance to the Moon, it will have an ideal home for astronomy.
Roman will use its propellant to power two types of thrusters that help it stay in its planned orbit around L2 and ensure the solar array panels face the Sun, which is the observatory’s main source of power throughout the mission. Roman has a five-year primary mission, and potentially enough fuel to support an additional five years for an extended mission. The Roman team recently cleaned and checked out the six solar array panels to prepare them for launch.
Researchers are eager to study thousands of exoplanets that Roman will discover, to learn how closely they resemble Earth. They will also use Roman to study the mystery of dark energy and why it’s causing the Universe to expand faster over time.
Now that fueling is complete, technicians will soon attach Roman to a device that secures to the rocket’s top stage. After that, Roman will be encapsulated within the rocket’s protective shell, known as a payload fairing. The payload fairing protects the spacecraft from aerodynamic forces and heat during ascent.
Launching nine months ahead of schedule, NASA and SpaceX are targeting liftoff for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, August 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.
Roman Space Telescope SD Card Abrading and Bonding (Photo Release)
A technician inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installs a memory card containing a total of 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Friday, July 17, 2026.
The names, submitted by people from across the globe, including astronauts from NASA’s Artemis II and Artemis III missions, will travel with the Roman observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, about one million miles from Earth, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balance out.
Roman is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of the agency’s modern science program.
NASA’s Next-Generation Telescope Arrives in Florida Ahead of Launch (News Release)
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope arrived at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 21, marking the start of final prelaunch preparations before liftoff later this summer.
After teams completed integration and testing on the observatory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, they loaded Roman into a protective and environmentally-controlled transportation container and drove it to the port of Baltimore. There, the agency’s Pegasus barge safely transported the nearly 18,000-pound (8,200-kilogram) spacecraft down the coast of the Atlantic Ocean to its new home in Florida at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, which recently completed upgrades to prepare for Roman’s arrival.
Technicians met the telescope at NASA Kennedy’s turn basin wharf and offloaded the trailer carrying the observatory from the barge, where they connected it to a truck that transported Roman to the servicing facility.
When the spacecraft arrives at the facility, technicians will complete initial cleaning outside the building before moving the shipping container into the facility’s airlock. Once in the airlock, they will perform additional cleaning to reduce any remaining contaminants from the trip. The facility’s air filtration system will also scrub the air until the team can safely open the inner door.
Once inside the facility, technicians will unbox the spacecraft, raise it to a vertical position in the airlock, and move it into the clean room.
On Monday, June 22, technicians plan to remove the cover from the transport container and move Roman into the high bay. Later, technicians will use large cranes to move Roman to its work platform - called the Pantheon. During the observatory’s time at the processing facility, technicians will perform several tasks, including testing the six solar panels and inspecting Roman’s insulation and thermal blankets to ensure that the observatory is fully protected and flight ready.
Specially-trained team members will load about 290 gallons of hydrazine fuel into the spacecraft’s tanks.
NASA is targeting launch no earlier than Sunday, August 30, on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy. This puts Roman eight months ahead of schedule.
After launch, Roman will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2. There, it will make observations that give astronomers the chance to study an incredible number of new objects. Roman’s wide field of view and rapid survey capabilities will reveal billions of galaxies, hundreds of thousands of new exoplanets, hundreds of blackholes, and will provide vast volumes of daily data for astronomers to study.
The observatory will also map how common different kinds of planets are in our galaxy and help answer big questions about the Universe, like what’s causing its rapid expansion and what distant worlds and cosmic objects look like in infrared light. In addition to its main instrument, which features a 300-megapixel camera, Roman will demonstrate technology designed to block starlight to directly image exoplanets and planet-forming disks.
Alongside Roman, the Pegasus barge also carried a weather cover for the Artemis III SLS(Space Launch System) core stage. The cover will protect the stage thermal systems while it sits at Launch Complex 39B in its short stack configuration. Because schedules aligned, the barge was able to transport NASA’s next flagship astrophysics mission together with the Artemis hardware, maximizing resources to support missions across the agency during the Golden Age of innovation and exploration.
She's nearly home! NASA's brand new Nancy Grace Roman Telescope has officially been delivered to Kennedy Space Center to complete final fueling and integration in preparation for launch on Falcon Heavy later this year. pic.twitter.com/ZqLWQ9GtWd
Hello, World! NASA Shares New Home for Roman Space Telescope Updates (News Release - June 3)
We’re kicking off the inaugural Roman blog post with a launch update: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is officially slated to launch on August 30, eight months ahead of schedule and even earlier than previously targeted.
With less than three months to go, the Roman team is now finishing up final tasks. Engineers are currently packing Roman up for a voyage from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, down to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida later this month.
Once at Kennedy, Roman will move into the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where it will undergo a thorough inspection to verify that all of the observatory’s components traveled well. In the weeks leading up to launch, engineers will perform powered testing and launch rehearsals, load about 290 gallons (roughly 1,100 liters) of hydrazine fuel into the tanks, and install the observatory on the adapter for the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that will propel it to its destination in space: the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, which is about four times farther away than the Moon is from Earth.
Next, Roman will be encapsulated in a protective fairing, or nose cone, which will shield the telescope during liftoff and its journey through the atmosphere. Roman will then move to a hangar for integration with the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket before rolling out to Launch Complex 39A at NASA Kennedy.
All this work will culminate in Roman delivering never-before seen views of the Universe. The observatory will pair a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to survey deep, vast swaths of sky. While the mission was designed with dark energy, dark matter, and planets outside our Solar System in mind, Roman’s unprecedented observational capability will offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to explore a broad range of cosmic phenomena.
NASA Targets Early September for Roman Space Telescope Launch (News Release)
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team is now targeting as soon as early September 2026 for launch, ahead of the agency’s commitment to flight no later than May 2027.
“Roman’s accelerated development is a true success story of what we can achieve when public investment, institutional expertise, and private enterprise come together to take on the near-impossible missions that change the world,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who announced the update at a news conference on April 21 at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Roman will pair a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to survey deep, vast swaths of sky. While the mission was designed with dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets in mind, Roman’s unprecedented observational capability will offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to explore all kinds of cosmic topics.
By the end of its five-year primary mission, Roman is expected to amass a 20,000-terabyte data archive. Scientists can draw on it to identify and study 100,000 exoplanets, hundreds of millions of galaxies, billions of stars, and rare objects and phenomena — including some that astronomers have never witnessed before.
Roman will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA and SpaceX will share more information about a specific launch date, and the agency will continue to share updates concerning prelaunch preparations as new information becomes available.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, and scientists from various research institutions.
NASA Completes Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Construction (News Release)
NASA’s next big eye on the cosmos is now fully assembled. On November 25, technicians joined the inner and outer portions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the largest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“Completing the Roman observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. “Transformative science depends on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered—piece by piece, test by test—an observatory that will expand our understanding of the Universe. As Roman moves into its final stage of testing following integration, we are focused on executing with precision and preparing for a successful launch on behalf of the global scientific community.”
After final testing, Roman will move to the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations in summer 2026. Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will send the observatory to its final destination a million miles from Earth.
“With Roman’s construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. “In the mission’s first five years, it’s expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies. We stand to learn a tremendous amount of new information about the Universe very rapidly after Roman launches.”
Observing from space will make Roman very sensitive to infrared light — light with a longer wavelength than our eyes can see — from far across the cosmos. Pairing its crisp infrared vision with a sweeping view of space will allow astronomers to explore myriad cosmic topics, from dark matter and dark energy to distant worlds and solitary black holes, and conduct research that would take hundreds of years using other telescopes.
“Within our lifetimes, a great mystery has arisen about the cosmos: why the expansion of the Universe seems to be accelerating. There is something fundamental about space and time we don’t yet understand, and Roman was built to discover what it is,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With Roman now standing as a complete observatory, which keeps the mission on track for a potentially early launch, we are a major step closer to understanding the Universe as never before. I couldn’t be prouder of the teams that have gotten us to this point.”
Double vision
Roman is equipped with two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration.
The coronagraph will demonstrate new technologies for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from distant stars and make it easier for scientists to see the faint light from planets in orbit around them. The Coronagraph aims to photograph worlds and dusty disks around nearby stars in visible light to help us see giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far.
“The question of ‘Are we alone?’ is a big one, and it’s an equally big task to build tools that can help us answer it,” said Feng Zhao, the Roman Coronagraph Instrument manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The Roman Coronagraph is going to bring us one step closer to that goal. It’s incredible that we have the opportunity to test this hardware in space on such a powerful observatory as Roman.”
The coronagraph team will conduct a series of pre-planned observations for three months spread across the mission’s first year-and-a-half of operations, after which the mission may conduct additional observations based on scientific community input.
The Wide Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel camera that will unveil the cosmos all the way from our Solar System to near the edge of the observable Universe. Using this instrument, each Roman image will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full moon. The mission will gather data hundreds of times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, adding up to 20,000 terabytes (20 petabytes) over the course of its five-year primary mission.
“The sheer volume of the data Roman will return is mind-boggling and key to a host of exciting investigations,” said Dominic Benford, Roman’s program scientist at NASA Headquarters.
Survey trifecta
Using the Wide Field Instrument, Roman will conduct three core surveys which will account for 75% of the primary mission. The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will combine the powers of imaging and spectroscopy to unveil more than a billion galaxies strewn across a wide swath of space and time. Astronomers will trace the evolution of the Universe to probe dark matter — invisible matter detectable only by how its gravity affects things we can see — and trace the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters over time.
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will probe our dynamic Universe by observing the same region of the cosmos repeatedly. Stitching these observations together to create movies will allow scientists to study how celestial objects and phenomena change over time periods of days to years. That will help astronomers study dark energy — the mysterious cosmic pressure thought to accelerate the Universe’s expansion — and could even uncover entirely new phenomena that we don’t yet know to look for.
Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will look inward to provide one of the deepest views ever of the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers will watch hundreds of millions of stars in search of microlensing signals — gravitational boosts of a background star’s light caused by the gravity of an intervening object. While astronomers have mainly discovered star-hugging worlds, Roman’s microlensing observations can find planets in the habitable zone of their star and farther out, including worlds like every planet in our Solar System except Mercury.
Microlensing will also reveal rogue planets—worlds that roam the galaxy untethered to a star — and isolated black holes. The same dataset will reveal 100,000 worlds that transit, or pass in front of, their host stars.
The remaining 25% of Roman’s five-year primary mission will be dedicated to other observations that will be determined with input from the broader scientific community. The first such program, called the Galactic Plane Survey, has already been selected.
Because Roman’s observations will enable such a wide range of science, the mission will have a General Investigator Program designed to support astronomers to reveal scientific discoveries using Roman data. As part of NASA’s commitment to Gold Standard Science, NASA will make all of Roman’s data publicly available with no exclusive use period. This ensures that multiple scientists and teams can use data at the same time, which is important since every Roman observation will address a wealth of science cases.
Roman’s namesake — Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer — made it her personal mission to make cosmic vistas readily accessible to all by paving the way for telescopes based in space.
“The mission will acquire enormous quantities of astronomical imagery that will permit scientists to make groundbreaking discoveries for decades to come, honoring Dr. Roman’s legacy in promoting scientific tools for the broader community,” said Jackie Townsend, Roman’s deputy project manager at NASA Goddard. “I like to think Dr. Roman would be extremely proud of her namesake telescope and thrilled to see what mysteries it will uncover in the coming years.”
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
NASA’s Webb Finds New Evidence for Planet Around Closest Solar Twin (News Release - August 7)
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found strong evidence of a giant planet orbiting a star in the stellar system closest to our own Sun. At just 4 light-years away from Earth, the Alpha Centauri triple star system has long been a compelling target in the search for worlds beyond our Solar System.
Alpha Centauri, located in the far southern sky, is made up of the binary Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, both Sun-like stars, and the faint red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. Alpha Centauri A is the third brightest star in the night sky. While there are three confirmed planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, the presence of other worlds surrounding Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B has proved challenging to confirm.
Now, Webb’s observations from its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) are providing the strongest evidence to date of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri A. The results have been accepted in a series of two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
If confirmed, the planet would be the closest to Earth that orbits in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. However, because the planet candidate is a gas giant, scientists say it would not support life as we know it.
“With this system being so close to us, any exoplanets found would offer our best opportunity to collect data on planetary systems other than our own. Yet, these are incredibly challenging observations to make, even with the world’s most powerful space telescope, because these stars are so bright, close, and move across the sky quickly,” said Charles Beichman, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech’s IPAC astronomy center, co-first author on the new papers. “Webb was designed and optimized to find the most distant galaxies in the Universe. The operations team at the Space Telescope Science Institute had to come up with a custom observing sequence just for this target, and their extra effort paid off spectacularly.”
Several rounds of meticulously-planned observations by Webb, careful analysis by the research team, and extensive computer modeling helped determine that the source seen in Webb’s image is likely to be a planet, and not a background object (like a galaxy), foreground object (a passing asteroid), or other detector or image artifact.
The first observations of the system took place in August 2024, using the coronagraphic mask aboard MIRI to block Alpha Centauri A’s light. While extra brightness from the nearby companion star Alpha Centauri B complicated the analysis, the team was able to subtract out the light from both stars to reveal an object over 10,000 times fainter than Alpha Centauri A, separated from the star by about two times the distance between the Sun and Earth.
While the initial detection was exciting, the research team needed more data to come to a firm conclusion. However, additional observations of the system in February 2025 and April 2025 (using Director’s Discretionary Time) did not reveal any objects like the one identified in August 2024.
“We are faced with the case of a disappearing planet! To investigate this mystery, we used computer models to simulate millions of potential orbits, incorporating the knowledge gained when we saw the planet, as well as when we did not,” said PhD student Aniket Sanghi of Caltech in Pasadena, California. Sanghi is a co-first author on the two papers covering the team’s research.
In these simulations, the team took into account both a 2019 sighting of the potential exoplanet candidate by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the new data from Webb, and considered orbits that would be gravitationally stable in the presence of Alpha Centauri B, meaning that the planet wouldn’t get flung out of the system.
Researchers say a non-detection in the second and third round of observations with Webb isn’t surprising.
“We found that in half of the possible orbits simulated, the planet moved too close to the star and wouldn’t have been visible to Webb in both February and April 2025,” said Sanghi.
Based on the brightness of the planet in the mid-infrared observations and the orbit simulations, researchers say it could be a gas giant approximately the mass of Saturn orbiting Alpha Centauri A in an elliptical path varying between 1 to 2 times the distance between Sun and Earth.
"If confirmed, the potential planet seen in the Webb image of Alpha Centauri A would mark a new milestone for exoplanet imaging efforts," Sanghi says. "Of all the directly-imaged planets, this would be the closest to its star seen so far. It's also the most similar in temperature and age to the giant planets in our Solar System, and nearest to our home, Earth," he says. "Its very existence in a system of two closely-separated stars would challenge our understanding of how planets form, survive and evolve in chaotic environments."
If confirmed by additional observations, the team’s results could transform the future of exoplanet science.
“This would become a touchstone object for exoplanet science, with multiple opportunities for detailed characterization by Webb and other observatories,” said Beichman.
For example, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch by May 2027 and potentially as early as fall 2026, is equipped with dedicated hardware that will test new technologies to observe binary systems like Alpha Centauri in search of other worlds. Roman’s visible light data would complement Webb’s infrared observations, yielding unique insights on the size and reflectivity of the planet.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our Solar System, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our Universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, DSS, A. Sanghi (Caltech), C. Beichman (NExScI, NASA / JPL - Caltech), D. Mawet (Caltech); Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)
NASA Installs Key ‘Sunblock’ Shield on Roman Space Telescope (News Release - July 31)
Technicians have successfully installed two sunshields onto NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s inner segment. Along with the observatory’s Solar Array Sun Shield and Deployable Aperture Cover, the panels (together called the Lower Instrument Sun Shade), will play a critical role in keeping Roman’s instruments cool and stable as the mission explores the infrared universe.
The team is on track to join Roman’s outer and inner assemblies this fall to complete the full observatory, which can then undergo further prelaunch testing.
“This shield is like an extremely strong sunblock for Roman’s sensitive instruments, protecting them from heat and light from the Sun that would otherwise overwhelm our ability to detect faint signals from space,” said Matthew Stephens, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The sunshade, which was designed and engineered at NASA Goddard, is essentially an extension of Roman’s solar panels, except without solar cells. Each sunshade flap is roughly the size of a garage door — about 7 by 7 feet (2.1 by 2.1 meters) — and 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) thick.
“They’re basically giant aluminum sandwiches, with metal sheets as thin as a credit card on the top and bottom and the central portion made up of a honeycomb structure,” said Conrad Mason, an aerospace engineer at NASA Goddard.
This design makes the panels lightweight yet stiff, and the material helps limit heat transfer from the side facing the Sun to the back—no small feat considering that the front will be hot enough to boil water (up to 216° Fahrenheit, or 102° Celsius) while the back will be much colder than Antarctica’s harshest winter (-211° Fahrenheit, or -135° Celsius). A specialized polymer film blanket will wrap around each panel to temper the heat, with 17 layers on the Sun side and one on the shaded side.
The sunshade will be stowed and gently deploy around an hour after launch.
“The deploying mechanisms have dampers that work like soft-close hinges for drawers or cabinets, so the panels won’t slam open and rattle the observatory,” Stephens said. “They each take about two minutes to move into their final positions. This is the very first system that Roman will deploy in space after the spacecraft separates from the launch vehicle.”
Now completely assembled, Roman’s inner segment is slated to undergo a 70-day thermal vacuum test next. Engineers and scientists will test the full functionality of the spacecraft, telescope and instruments under simulated space conditions. Following the test, the sunshade will be temporarily removed while the team joins Roman’s outer and inner assemblies, and then reattached to complete the observatory.
The mission remains on track for launch no later than May 2027 with the team aiming for as early as fall 2026.
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Team Installs Observatory’s Solar Panels (News Release)
On June 14 and 16, technicians installed solar panels onto NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, one of the final steps in assembling the observatory. Collectively called the Solar Array Sun Shield, these panels will power and shade the observatory, enabling all of the mission’s observations and helping keep the instruments cool.
“At this point, the observatory is about 90% complete,” said Jack Marshall, the Solar Array Sun Shield lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We just need to join two large assemblies, and then we’ll run the whole Roman observatory through a series of tests. We’re currently on track for launch several months earlier than the promised date of no later than May 2027.” The team is working towards launch as early as fall 2026.
The Solar Array Sun Shield is made up of six panels, each covered in solar cells. The two central panels will remain fixed to the outer barrel assembly (the observatory’s outer shell) while the other four will deploy once Roman is in space, swinging up to align with the center panels.
The panels will spend the entirety of the mission facing the Sun to provide a steady supply of power to the observatory’s electronics. This orientation will also shade much of the observatory and help keep the instruments cool, which is critical for an infrared observatory. Since infrared light is detectable as heat, excess warmth from the spacecraft’s own components would saturate the detectors and effectively blind the telescope.
“Now that the panels have been installed, the outer portion of the Roman observatory is complete,” said Goddard’s Aaron Vigil, a mechanical engineer working on the array. Next, technicians will test deploy the solar panels and the observatory’s “visor” (the deployable aperture cover). The team is also testing the core portion of the observatory, assessing the electronics and conducting a thermal vacuum test to ensure that the system operates as planned in the harsh space environment.
This will keep the project on track to connect Roman’s inner and outer segments in November, resulting in a whole observatory by the end of the year that can then undergo pre-launch tests.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a science team comprising of scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
NASA, ESA, CSA, Kristen McQuinn & Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
This Tiny Galaxy Is Answering Some Big Questions (Press Release)
Researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to reveal patterns of star formation in an isolated dwarf galaxy.
Sometimes little galaxies hold big clues to star formation over cosmic time. An STScI-led team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope to study Leo P, a dwarf galaxy located about 5.3 million light-years from Earth that was discovered in 2013. Leo P is relatively isolated from other, larger galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda, which means that it has been unaffected by their influence.
The team found that Leo P formed stars early on but then stopped making them shortly after a period known as the Epoch of Reionization, which brought an end to the Universe’s “dark ages.” After a few billion years, the galaxy reignited and started forming new stars again. This is unusual because most dwarf galaxies whose star formation shut down never restarted.
Over cosmic time, galaxies start small and grow larger by accumulating gas and merging with each other. Many small “seed” galaxies persist into the present day, and astronomers study these dwarf galaxies to learn how they have evolved over time. Of particular interest, isolated dwarf galaxies that have been unaffected by mergers can provide a window into processes that function on a cosmic scale.
A team of researchers has found that a nearby, isolated dwarf galaxy whose star formation had largely ceased early in the Universe later “reignited,” experiencing a rebirth that many other small galaxies didn’t. The results were presented in a press conference at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland. They were also published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Principal investigator Kristen McQuinn, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, and her team studied Leo P, a dwarf galaxy some 5.3 million light-years from Earth that was discovered in 2013. Leo P is far enough away from the Local Group, a gathering of galaxies that includes the Milky Way, to be a neighbor without being affected by them. The “P” in Leo P refers to “pristine,” because the galaxy has so few chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium.
“Leo P provides a unique laboratory to explore the early evolution of a low-mass galaxy in detail,” said McQuinn, who is also the mission head of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s Science Operations Center at STScI.
McQuinn and her team studied Leo P using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. They imaged Leo P using Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) to determine the brightness and colors of thousands of stars within the dwarf galaxy. That data yielded information about the star formation history within the galaxy.
The team found that Leo P formed stars early on but then stopped making them shortly after a period known as the Epoch of Reionization, a significant period in the early history of the Universe. After a few billion years, the galaxy reignited and started forming new stars again.
“We have a measurement like this for only three other galaxies that are all isolated from the Milky Way, and they all show a similar pattern,” McQuinn said. Observations of dwarf galaxies within the Local Group, however, show that star production within them ceased after the Epoch of Reionization and never resumed.
The contrast between the star production of isolated dwarf galaxies versus those in the Local Group provides compelling evidence that it isn’t just the mass of a galaxy at the time of reionization that determines whether its star formation will be shut down, or quenched. Its environment — meaning whether it is isolated or functioning as a satellite of a larger system — is an important factor.
McQuinn said that the observations will help pin down not only when little galaxies formed their stars, but also how the reionization of the Universe may have impacted how small structures form. “If the trend holds, it provides insights about the growth of low-mass structures that are not only a fundamental constraint for structure formation but a benchmark for cosmological simulations,” she said.
The researchers also found that Leo P is metal-poor, possessing 3% of the Sun’s heavy elements (which astronomers call metals). This makes Leo P similar to the primordial galaxies of the early Universe. The researchers plan to use Webb to study four additional isolated, star-forming dwarf galaxies to determine if similar trends in star formation rates are common among them.
NASA Successfully Integrates Roman Mission’s Telescope, Instruments (News Release - December 12)
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully integrated the mission’s telescope and two instruments onto the instrument carrier, marking the completion of the Roman payload. Now the team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will begin joining the payload to the spacecraft.
“We’re in the middle of an exciting stage of mission preparation,” said Jody Dawson, a Roman systems engineer at NASA Goddard. “All the components are now here at Goddard, and they’re coming together in quick succession. We expect to integrate the telescope and instruments with the spacecraft before the year is up.”
Engineers first integrated the Coronagraph Instrument, a technology demonstration designed to image exoplanets — worlds outside of our Solar System — by using a complex suite of masks and active mirrors to obscure the glare of the planets’ host stars.
Then the team integrated the Optical Telescope Assembly, which includes a 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) primary mirror, nine additional mirrors and their supporting structures and electronics. The telescope will focus cosmic light and send it to Roman’s instruments, revealing billions of objects strewn throughout space and time. Roman will be the most stable large telescope ever built, at least 10 times more so than NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and 100 times more than the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Roman's stability will allow scientists to make measurements at levels of precision that can answer important questions about dark energy, dark matter and worlds beyond our Solar System.
With those components in place, the team then added Roman’s primary instrument. Called the Wide Field Instrument, this 300-megapixel infrared camera will give Roman a deep, panoramic view of the Universe. Through the Wide Field Instrument’s surveys, scientists will be able to explore distant exoplanets, stars, galaxies, black holes, dark energy, dark matter and more.
Thanks to the Wide Field Instrument and the observatory’s efficiency, Roman will be able to image large areas of the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble with the same sharp, sensitive image quality.
“It would be quicker to list the astronomy topics Roman won’t be able to address than those it will,” said Julie McEnery, the Roman senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. “We’ve never had a tool like this before. Roman will revolutionize the way we do astronomy.”
The telescope and instruments were mounted to Roman’s instrument carrier and precisely aligned in the largest clean room at Goddard, where the observatory is being assembled. Now, the whole assembly is being attached to the Roman spacecraft, which will deliver the observatory to its orbit and enable it to function once there.
At the same time, the mission’s deployable aperture cover — a visor that will shield the telescope from unwanted light — is being joined to the outer barrel assembly, which serves as the telescope’s exoskeleton.
“We’ve had an incredible year, and we’re looking forward to another one!” said Bear Witherspoon, a Roman systems engineer at NASA Goddard. “While the payload and spacecraft undergo a smattering of testing together, the team will work toward integrating the solar panels onto the outer barrel assembly.”
That keeps the observatory on track for completion by fall 2026 and launch no later than May 2027.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
