Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Planned Sep 28, 2026

Roman's Wide Field Instrument, a 300-megapixel infrared camera, captures a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble's at comparable resolution, making it capable of mapping the sky roughly 1,000 times faster. The mission's core survey programme targets dark energy, dark matter distribution, and exoplanets detected via gravitational microlensing; a separate Coronagraph Instrument is designed to suppress starlight and directly image known planetary companions of nearby stars.

The telescope was renamed from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) to honour Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, who championed the case for a large space telescope in the agency's earliest years.

launching fromLC-39AKennedy

aboardFalcon HeavyintoSun-Earth L2

Payload

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Infrared astronomy

last updatedJun 10, 2026