Nancy Grace Roman Telescope: SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launches Observatory To Space

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 1126 UTC on Aug. 30, from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center, to begin its journey to the **Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2).

About 2.5 minutes into flight, the rocket's two side boosters cut off their engines for a nominal stage separation and began trajectory burns to return for a landing back at SpaceX's Landing Zones 2 and 40 (LZ-2, LZ-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, a few miles downrange from LC-39A.

The rocket's core booster continued onward to deploy Falcon Heavy's second stage equipped with Roman into space. The observatory successfully separated from the rocket's upper stage about 31 minutes after liftoff, and is en route to its operational halo orbit around Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2), roughly 1.5 million kilometers from Earth--the same orbital neighborhood occupied by the James Webb Space Telescope--where it will orbit the sun in alignment with Earth. It will spend about a month in transit before beginning its five-year scientific mission.

One of the Falcon Heavy side boosters used in today's mission, B1072 previously supported the launch of the GOES-U and ViaSat-3 F3 missions. This is the first launch for the other side booster (B1104) and the expended core booster (B1105).

The Roman telescope, with a primary mirror spanning 2.4 meters, features a field of view 100 times larger and a survey speed 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope, capable of measuring light from up to one billion galaxies.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope--with its coronagraph and Wide Field Instrument (WFI)--will study dark energy and dark matter conduct a census of exoplanets using gravitational microlensing, and map the expansion history of the universe.

While Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope are built to get close looks at distant phenomena in the universe, Roman will study the bigger picture of our cosmos. Its WFI will take extremely wide images of the universe, capturing ultra-high definition views across broad swaths of the sky. It's also equipped with the first active coronagraph to be used in space, which will revolutionize exoplanet studies.

"The smallest Roman images will be a billion pixels," Dominic Benford, progam scientist for the Roman Space Telescope, said during live commentary. "When we take a billion-pixel image, there isn't a screen on Earth large enough to display all the pixels."

The coronagraph works by blocking out the light of distant stars in such a way that scientists can examine minute details around those stars — meaning they can map out exoplanets orbiting in the systems. Once active, Roman's WFI will capture more than a terabyte of data daily; its largest survey will take over a year to complete and is expected to fill more than half a million 4K TVs.

"The scope is extraordinary," Roman senior scientist Julie McEnery said during live commentary. "We will do a survey of our own Milky Way galaxy and find 20 billion stars. That would make it the largest catalog of astronomical objects that's ever been produced."

Nancy Grace was NASA's first chief astronomer, the first woman in an executive leadership role at the space agency. Roman, who died in 2018, advocated for a telescope in space, leading to the Hubble Space Telescope. Roman earned the nickname "Mother of Hubble" as a result.

"It was Nancy in the old days, before the internet and before Google and email and all that stuff, who really helped to sell the Hubble Space Telescope, organize the astronomers, who eventually convinced Congress to fund it," Ed Weiler, Roman’s successor as Hubble's chief scientist, told the Voice of America in 2011.

Sunday's launch occurred nine months ahead of schedule, beating the original May 2027 target. The mission, which cost approximately $4.3 billion, was cleared for launch following a Flight Readiness Review on August 21. NASA anticipates the first images from the Roman Space Telescope will be available by early next year (2027), following a commissioning period that includes instrument calibrations.