NASA schedules Roman Space Telescope launch no earlier than Aug. 30

NASA announced that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be launched aboard a SpaceX rocket no earlier than August 30 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The observatory, weighing about 8,200 kg and measuring roughly 12.7 m long and 4.4 m wide when deployed, has a field of view at least 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Roman telescope will survey billions of galaxies, investigate dark matter and dark energy, and search for thousands of exoplanets using a 288‑megapixel wide‑field camera and a coronagraph. It will operate for at least five years at the Sun‑Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million km from Earth, and all data will be released publicly. The mission honors NASA’s first chief of astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman, often called the “mother of the Hubble Telescope.”