Overview
- The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on Sunday, August 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy after NASA completed hydrazine fueling and declared the observatory mission-ready.
- Technicians will encapsulate and integrate Roman with the Falcon Heavy in the final prelaunch steps before liftoff, with the telescope set to travel to the Sun–Earth Lagrange Point 2 and begin returning data later this year.
- Roman will reach its L2 orbit point in December and perform a final orbit insertion around day 100, with enough fuel provisioned for station-keeping and momentum dumps for at least five years.
- Its Wide-Field Instrument will deliver Hubble-like sensitivity over a field roughly 50 times larger, producing an expected more-than-500-terabytes of data per year and enabling panoramic surveys of billions of stars and roughly 2 billion galaxies.
- A demonstration coronagraph on Roman will block starlight to directly image nearby exoplanets, and the mission’s early completion under budget positions it to rapidly find rare targets for follow-up with Hubble, Webb, and ground telescopes.