flown by SpaceX USA

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Success
AUG 30202611:26:04 UTC

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.

launched 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
    side Landed on ground pad · LZ-2
  • 02 Booster 2 B1105
    core no recovery attempt
  • 03 Booster 3 B1104.1
    side Landed on ground pad · LZ-40

Payload

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Infrared astronomy

last updated Aug 30, 2026