NASA to Launch Roman Telescope on Aug. 30 to Map Millions of Galaxies and Hunt 200,000 Exoplanets
Updated
Updated · The Washington Post · Aug 26
NASA to Launch Roman Telescope on Aug. 30 to Map Millions of Galaxies and Hunt 200,000 Exoplanets
3 articles · Updated · The Washington Post · Aug 26
Summary
Aug. 30 is the earliest launch date for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will head to an orbit about 1 million miles from Earth for dark-energy and exoplanet surveys.
An 8-foot mirror feeding 18 detectors gives Roman a wide-field infrared view—unlike Hubble or Webb’s narrower targets—letting it scan huge sky areas for supernovas, dark matter signals and ancient cosmic structures.
60,000 to 200,000 new exoplanets could be detected through transit and microlensing searches, while an experimental coronagraph will try to directly image faint planets beside bright stars.
Congress funded Roman to completion at a $4.3 billion lifetime cost after an earlier Trump administration proposal to cancel it; NASA now says the mission is launching ahead of its revised no-later-than-May 2027 deadline.
Five years is the primary mission, with first public data expected in early 2027 and results likely to complement the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s decade-long sky survey.