NASA has officially completed construction of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, one of the largest space observatory projects after Hubble (NASA’s telescope currently in orbit).
Through its official website, NASA announced that final stage assembly would be carried out on November 25 in NASA’s largest clean room, Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, United States.
NASA Associate Administrator, Amit Kshatriya, said that the construction of the Roman telescope was the result of highly disciplined engineering. Roman is now heading to the final testing stage before being taken to the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, in preparation for launch which is scheduled for sometime in late 2026 to May 2027.
This telescope will be flown using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to an orbital position one million miles from Earth.
“Every component and every test brings us closer to expanding our understanding of the universe,” said Amit Kshatriya, quoted from NASA’s written statement uploaded on Thursday (4/12/2025) yesterday.
Through this telescope, scientists can study dark matter
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The Roman telescope was designed to be very sensitive to infrared light. With the ability to capture long waves of light and a super wide view, this telescope will allow scientists to study various cosmic phenomena, ranging from dark matter, dark energy, distant galaxies, to planets orbiting other stars.
NASA science officer Nicky Fox explained that one of Roman’s big goals is to answer the puzzle of why the universe is expanding faster and faster.
“There is something about space and time that we do not yet understand, and Roman was created to discover it,” he said.
Equipped with 2 instruments
Roman brings two mainstay instruments:
1. Wide Field Instrument
This 288 megapixel resolution camera will capture an area of sky wider than the size of the full Moon in one shot. With data collection speeds hundreds of times faster than Hubble, Roman is expected to generate 20 petabytes of data in five years.
2. Coronagraph Instrument
This device is a demonstration of advanced technology for directly photographing planets outside the solar system. By blocking starlight, the Coronagraph can capture planets that were previously too faint or too close to be seen.
Nancy Grace Roman’s Mission
As much as 75% of Roman’s mission time will be spent on three main surveys:
1. High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey
Map more than a billion galaxies to understand the evolution of the universe and dark matter.
2. High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey
Observe changes in celestial objects over time to study dark energy and discover new phenomena.
3. Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey
Stare at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and look for microlens signals to find Earth-like planets, star-free planets, and even black holes.
In addition, the remaining 25% of the mission is reserved for other scientific programs whose proposals come from the global scientific community. Roman’s data will be released openly with no waiting period, so all scientists in the world can use it at once.
Source: NASA
