NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on 30 August 2026 at 07:26 EDT from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, according to an announcement published by ESA.
The observatory carries a 2.4-metre primary mirror and two main scientific payloads: the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument. The Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel visible and near-infrared camera designed to capture wide-area spectroscopic data alongside crisp images. It provides Hubble-quality image resolution across a field of view more than 200 times larger than Hubble's.
ESA is supplying essential hardware for the mission, including the spacecraft's batteries, star trackers, and detectors for the coronagraph instrument. The European agency will also supply deep-space ground station communications and data download capability using its 35-metre antenna in New Norcia, Australia, alongside scientific expertise via its Mission of Opportunity programme.
Dark matter and cosmic expansion
Roman will scan approximately 12 percent of the sky above the galactic plane to map dark matter, which makes up about 25 percent of the Universe. It will detect dark matter by measuring weak gravitational lensing, observing how massive clumps of invisible matter warp the shapes of millions of distant galaxies.
To investigate dark energy, which accounts for an estimated 70 percent of the Universe, the mission will use multiple observational methods. The telescope will track type Ia supernovas to calculate cosmic expansion rates across predictable brightness benchmarks. It will also map galaxy clustering along baryonic acoustic oscillations—frozen sound waves left over from the early Universe that expanded over cosmic time.
Planetary search and extreme events
The observatory will monitor millions of stars in the galactic centre to detect exoplanets. Mission scientists expect the survey to find over 1,200 new worlds through gravitational microlensing and more than 100,000 transiting planets that cross before their host stars.
The Coronagraph Instrument serves as a technology demonstrator that blocks host starlight to image faint orbiting bodies directly, even when a planet is over 100 million times fainter than its star. Roman will also detect transient phenomena across the cosmos, including tidal disruption events, the formation of black holes during neutron star mergers, and distant quasars from the reionisation era.
