NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will rewrite how we study the universe

image via New Scientist

August 27, 2026, 3:15 PM

• •NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on August 30 and will operate from the Sun-Earth L2 point about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
• •Roman’s 2.4-meter mirror and wide-field infrared instrument will let it image about 100 times more sky per exposure than Hubble or JWST.
• •NASA selected 118 General Investigator programs, including studies of little red dots, bright early galaxies, deep-field surveys, nearby galaxies and possible failed supernovae.
• •The telescope is expected to return about 1.4 terabytes of science data per day, or roughly 500 terabytes per year.
• •Planned projects include mapping about half a billion stars in Andromeda and Triangulum and searching roughly 1,000 galaxies for stars that collapse directly into black holes.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is nearing launch, and astronomers are preparing 118 approved programs that will use its unusually wide and detailed view of the universe. The telescope is designed to study dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets, while also enabling searches for little red dots, exceptionally bright early galaxies and deep-field supernovae from the universe’s first stars. Other projects will map stellar populations in Andromeda and Triangulum and track their motions to reconstruct past galactic mergers and identify ultrafaint dwarf galaxies. Roman’s combination of a Hubble-sized mirror, wide-field imaging and large data output is expected to make it a major new survey instrument for astronomy.

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