Mission overview
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will pair a large feld of view with crisp infrared vision to scan vast, deep swaths of sky. This fagship mission is designed to help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets. Since each of Roman’s surveys will sample such a large volume of the cosmos, the mission will also offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to conduct a broad range of additional science. From objects in our outer solar system and exploding stars to growing black holes and galaxies by the billions, very little will be beyond Roman’s reach. Roman’s data will be made public as soon as it’s processed so many teams will be able to analyze it simultaneously. The mission is targeting an Aug. 30, 2026, launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 4
Science goals
The universe is full of shadows whose silhouettes hint at the presence of a strange form of matter. It behaves somewhat like an ocean current, invisibly steering everything within it. Scientists have been on a cosmic ghost hunt to fnd and study it for over 80 years, following a couple of perplexing discoveries. First, Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed that galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving so quickly they should have been fung away into space — yet they remained gravitationally bound to the cluster by unseen matter. Then in the 1970s, American astronomer Vera Rubin discovered the same type of problem in individual spiral galaxies. Stars toward the edge of the galaxy m...
Imagine you planted a fower and instead of its growth slowing as it reached its mature height, it suddenly shot up like Jack’s beanstalk in the classic fairy tale instead. Or what if you threw a baseball up into the air and instead of falling back down it rocketed up even faster like it was equipped with an invisible jetpack? That’s similar to what astronomers have discovered about the universe’s expansion. After the big bang sent the universe’s contents hurtling apart, scientists thought the expansion would gradually slow down. But instead galaxies are racing away at an ever-increasing clip, swept apart by an unseen power dubbed dark energy. All the stars in our galaxy, the particles in...
