Overview
- NASA confirmed Aug. 30, 2026 as the target launch date from Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy and final integrations and payload installations are complete.
- Mission teams have installed an SD card carrying more than 1.3 million names collected in the 'Send Your Name with Roman' public campaign as a time capsule on the observatory.
- After liftoff Roman will spend about a month travelling to the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, then undergo roughly 100 days of commissioning before beginning its planned five-year survey operations.
- Roman pairs a Hubble-sized mirror with a roughly 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument that gives it about 100 times Hubble’s field of view and is expected to return hundreds of terabytes of data per year.
- Besides mapping dark matter and dark energy and carrying out the largest exoplanet microlensing survey, Roman includes a coronagraph tech demonstrator and may help refine asteroid orbits through proposed infrared observations.