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Why NASA's new space telescope will blow away Hubble's capabilities

Now on a three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon reveal some of the universe's darkest secrets. The instrument was launched into space this past Sunday. Roman was designed to survey the universe a thousand times faster than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. It pairs a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to explore vast swaths of the sky and probe deeply into cosmic history.

This flagship mission will help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and worlds outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets. Its surveys will support a broad range of research extending far beyond the mission's main science goals. The mission launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT Aug. 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"Roman is exactly the kind of success story we want to see across NASA," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "Delivered ahead of schedule and on budget, this mission reflects more than a decade of dedication from the NASA workforce and our industry partners. Now, Roman will give us a new atlas of the universe, push the boundaries of discovery, and demonstrate what is possible when America's space program pairs bold ambition with disciplined execution."

The ground control team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began receiving telemetry data from Roman seven minutes after launch. The Falcon Heavy rocket performed as expected, separating from the observatory 31 minutes into the flight. After separating from the center core, the rocket's boosters safely returned to the launch site for refurbishment.

"Roman will be a discovery machine that will bring us closer than ever before to answering humanity's most profound questions about our cosmic history," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "With its large field of view and fast survey speeds, Roman will usher us into a new era of discovery and make the invisible visible, setting the foundation for humanity's search for life beyond our solar system."

During launch and early orbit, Roman used the Near Space Network's ground stations and relay satellites to exchange tracking, telemetry, and command data with ground controllers. About 70 minutes after launch, the Deep Space Network took over communications and guided Roman toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth.

The Roman team also confirmed successful deployment of the observatory's solar panels and lower instrument sun shade an hour and 23 minutes after launch. Within the upcoming days, Roman's high-gain antenna and visor-like deployable aperture cover will deploy, ground controllers will initiate the first of two-mid-course corrections, and the Coronagraph Instrument will power on. This instrument will demonstrate the technology that future missions like NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory concept could use to image Earth-like planets in the search for life in the universe. Roman's Coronagraph will take a giant step in that direction by snapping pictures of Jupiter-like planets.

A few weeks into Roman's voyage, its primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument, will activate. This 300-megapixel infrared camera has 18 4K detectors, each about the size of a saltine cracker. These detectors collect photons of light that will be decoded into crisp cosmic panoramas. Thanks to the observatory's rigid design and stable optical performance, it will rapidly scan the sky without needing substantial time between separate observations.

Throughout the rest of Roman's three-month commissioning period, scientists will run the instruments through a series of calibrations and tests. NASA anticipates releasing Roman's first images by early 2027.

Roman will send back 1.4 terabytes of data every day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission, so far. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and citizen scientists will help sift through it and flag significant findings, which astronomers can then study.

"We've never been able to view the universe with eyes like Roman's before," said Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. "There's no telling what more we'll know and have seen by this time next year."

More details about the new telescope
Roman is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (1925-2018), NASA's first chief of astronomy. She championed space-based observatories that could study the universe above Earth's hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community. While she's known as the "mother" of the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman played an even broader role as the driving force behind NASA's entire Great Observatories program, which included Hubble along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the retired Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope.

To make Roman's sensitive measurements possible, the telescope will observe from a vantage point about 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) away from Earth in the direction opposite the Sun. At this special place in space, called the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, gravitational forces balance to keep objects in steady orbits with very little assistance.

Roman's barrel-like shape will help block out unwanted light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon, and the spacecraft's distant location will help keep the instruments cool. The thermal stability of an observatory at L2 will provide a ten-fold improvement beyond Hubble in much of the data Roman will gather.

The amount of detail these observations will reveal is directly related to the size of the telescope's mirror, since a larger surface gathers more light. Roman's primary mirror is 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) across. While it's the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope's main mirror, it is less than one-fourth the weight. Roman's mirror weighs only 410 pounds (186 kilograms) thanks to major improvements in technology.

The primary mirror, in concert with other optics, will send light to Roman's two science instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and Coronagraph.

The Wide Field Instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow scientists to look very far back in time. Seeing the universe in its early stages will help unravel how it has expanded throughout its history, which will hint at how it may continue to evolve.

Roman's WFI has been integrated onto the instrument carrier along with the Coronagraph Instrument.

Using this instrument, each Roman image will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full Moon. Hubble's infrared images, taken with its Wide Field Camera 3, are about 200 times smaller. Even Hubble's widest exposures, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, are nearly 100 times smaller. Over the first five years of observations, Roman will image over 50 times as much sky as Hubble covered in its first 30 years, surveying the sky up to 1,000 times faster than Hubble can while maintaining similar sensitivity and infrared resolution.

The 18 detectors at the instrument's heart will enable all of the mission's science by converting starlight into electrical signals, which will then be decoded into high-resolution images of large patches of the sky. Since the WFI has such an enormous field of view, each image will provide a wealth of information. Scientists will be able to quickly conduct research that could take hundreds of years using other telescopes.

The data gathered will enable scientists to discover new and uniquely detailed information about planetary systems around other stars. It will map how matter is structured and distributed throughout the cosmos, which could ultimately allow scientists to discover the fate of the universe.

The WFI is designed to detect faint infrared light from across the universe. Infrared light is observed at wavelengths longer than the human eye can detect. The expansion of the universe stretches light emitted by distant galaxies, causing visible or ultraviolet light to appear as infrared by the time it reaches us. Such distant galaxies are difficult to observe from the ground because Earth's atmosphere blocks some infrared wavelengths, and the upper atmosphere glows brightly enough to overwhelm light from these distant galaxies.

By going into space and using a Hubble-size telescope, the WFI will be sensitive enough to detect infrared light from farther than any previous telescope. This will help scientists capture a new view of the universe that could help solve some of its biggest mysteries, one of which is how the universe became the way it is now.

Roman's other main instrument is the Coronagraph Instrument. It is designed to demonstrate the most advanced technologies ever flown in space for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from stars and make it possible for scientists to see the faint reflected light from planets in orbit around them, revealing giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far.

You can take a 360-degree look at the telescope and learn more details at NASA's interactive page: science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/explore-roman/.

The spacecraft also carries the names of more than a million people. This summer, everyone was invited to submit their name to be added to a memory card attached to a plaque on the Roman spacecraft. More than 1.3 million people did so and will have their names carried all the way to L2.

Roman is the fourth primary mission NASA has launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Earlier this year, the agency's Launch Services Program worked with SpaceX to accelerate the launch date to accommodate the space telescope's early completion.

The telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a team of scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc., L3Harris Technologies, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging. Contributions to Roman also are made by ESA, JAXA, the French space agency CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.

To learn more about the Roman mission, visit: nasa.gov/roman.

Sources: Compiled from numerous NASA reports

Published September 2026

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