Overview
- NASA and mission scientists outlined the Galactic Plane Survey, a two‑year program mapping about 691 square degrees in infrared to pierce dust and catalog tens of billions of stars across the Milky Way’s plane and bulge.
- The plan adds time‑domain coverage by repeatedly imaging 19 square degrees for roughly 5.5 days and includes targeted fields totaling about 4 square degrees using the full filter set and spectroscopic modes.
- A new roadmap for Roman’s High‑Latitude Wide‑Area Survey describes detecting and stacking thousands to tens of thousands of cosmic voids, leveraging galaxy positions, redshifts and weak lensing to tighten constraints on dark energy.
- Roman’s Wide‑Field Instrument offers a view about 100 times Hubble’s and is expected to produce roughly 20 petabytes of data in its five‑year prime mission, while the mission’s coronagraph will flight‑test the first active exoplanet‑imaging system in space.
- NASA says the spacecraft was fully integrated on Nov. 25 at Goddard and is progressing through final tests toward a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch targeted for May 2027, with officials noting possible readiness by fall 2026.