NASA's Roman Space Telescope will reveal the universe in a way the JWST and Hubble cannot

image via Space.com

August 25, 2026, 5:00 PM

• •Roman is scheduled to launch Aug. 30 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
• •Its primary mission is five years, with a possible extension to 10 years if operations go well.
• •Roman's Wide-Field Instrument has a field of view about 100 times greater than Hubble's infrared instrument and about 50 times wider than JWST's view.
• •NASA says Roman could generate about 500 terabytes of data per year, compared with Hubble's roughly 400 terabytes accumulated over decades.
• •The telescope is designed to support dark matter and dark energy studies by observing light from about a billion galaxies.
• •Its coronagraph is intended to detect exoplanets up to 100 million times fainter than their host stars.

The article explains that NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is designed to survey huge areas of the universe far faster and wider than Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope. Its Wide-Field Instrument will gather enormous amounts of infrared data, helping scientists find supernovas, fast radio bursts, colliding neutron stars and other targets that narrow-view telescopes might miss. Roman is also intended to advance research on dark matter and dark energy by measuring light from vast numbers of galaxies and building broad three-dimensional views of the cosmos. In addition, its coronagraph is expected to directly image exoplanets by suppressing starlight at performance levels beyond current space-based coronagraphs.

Read original article