National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Unveils Roman Space Telescope

Key facts

• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unveiled the Roman space telescope to scan for planets outside the solar system and probe dark matter and dark energy.
• The telescope is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, referred to as the Mother of Hubble.
• The Roman space telescope cost over $4 billion and took more than a decade to build.
• The telescope features a field of view at least 100 times larger than the Hubble space telescope and will be positioned 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.
• The telescope is expected to transmit 11 terabytes of data per day to Earth.
• The Roman space telescope is scheduled to be launched aboard a SpaceX rocket from Florida in September at the earliest.
• The telescope will complement the James Webb Space Telescope, Europe's Euclid space telescope, and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile.
• The mission aims to discover tens of thousands of new planets, billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae, and tens of billions of stars.