Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
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.
LIFTOFF
AUG 30 2026launched from LC-39A Kennedy
aboard Falcon Heavy B5 into Sun-Earth L2
Broadcast
Watch how the launch went
Boosters · 3
- 01 Booster 1 B1072.3 sideside Landed on ground pad · LZ-2
- 02 Booster 2 B1105 corecore no recovery attempt
- 03 Booster 3 B1104.1 sideside Landed on ground pad · LZ-40
Payload
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
Infrared astronomy

