National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Completes Assembly of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Key facts

• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has completed the final assembly of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
• The telescope is expected to launch in 2026 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
• The mission aims to study dark energy, dark matter, galaxy formation, and distant planetary systems using visible and near-infrared light.
• The observatory features a primary mirror approximately 2.4 metres wide and can collect data around 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope during survey operations.
• Each image captured by the telescope will cover an area of the sky roughly 100 times larger than a single shot from Hubble.
• The telescope is equipped with a coronagraph designed to block bright starlight to enable direct imaging of large exoplanets, particularly gas giants similar to Jupiter.
• The coronagraph system may detect planets up to 100 million times dimmer than their host stars.
• Following launch, the telescope will travel nearly one million miles from Earth to be positioned at Lagrange Point 2.
• The telescope will be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center for final preparations after undergoing vibration and thermal simulations.