NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has seen starlight for the first time, a key milestone on the road to science operations. The telescope activated its 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument on September 11, and NASA announced on September 15 that the camera had recorded its first photons from the cosmos.

The released test images look unusual: stars appear as blurry rings, like doughnuts. NASA says this was expected. The 18 infrared detectors were still stowed in their launch configuration, far from best focus, and the ring shape comes from the telescope's secondary mirror blocking the centre of the incoming beam.

The images give engineers a baseline to align the optics and fine-tune focus. The team also confirmed thermal control is working as expected and will next activate the fine-guidance system. Roman launched on August 30 and is still cruising to the second Lagrange point, about a million miles from Earth.

Its mission is to survey vast areas of the infrared sky with Hubble-like sharpness, hunting dark matter and dark energy and finding new exoplanets. The first science images are expected in early 2027.