Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: What to know about NASA’s new space observatory

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's newest orbital observatory, launched on August 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The $4.3 billion telescope is headed to an observation point 1.6 million kilometers away, where NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is also positioned, and is expected to take more than three months to reach its destination.

The telescope, named after NASA's first chief astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, will study dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets. According to NASA science mission director Nicky Fox, it will "find thousands of supernovae, tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies and tens of billions of stars" with its massive field of view. The telescope's infrared camera is designed to carry out observations far faster than the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Roman Space Telescope will survey huge portions of the cosmos at a speed and scale unmatched by existing space telescopes. Its enormous field of view allows it to see an area of the sky more than 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope while maintaining comparable sensitivity. The telescope will also conduct an extensive survey of the Milky Way's central bulge, providing scientists with an unprecedented look into the crowded heart of our galaxy, and is expected to produce the largest catalog of astronomical objects ever produced, with 20 billion stars, according to Space.com.

Brief written by urgent.news from Hindustan Times - World News, The Korea Times, Live Mint, Space.com, Associated Press — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.