NASA’s Roman telescope heads to space to map dark matter
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The telescope is now travelling toward the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, about one million miles from Earth. The journey takes roughly three months.
Roman is designed to study dark matter and dark energy, two of the biggest unsolved questions in cosmology. It will survey billions of galaxies across the sky.
Its Wide Field Instrument has a field of view about 100 times larger than Hubble’s. It can map huge areas of sky in visible and near-infrared light.
The telescope also carries a coronagraph that blocks starlight to directly image exoplanets. Roman is expected to discover around 100,000 new planets through transits and microlensing.
The 2.4-metre mirror telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer. She is often called the mother of Hubble for building NASA’s space astronomy programme.
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