Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
Nancy Grace Roman
The telescope on your shirt is flying
On a Sunday morning this August, a Falcon Heavy lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying NASA’s newest flagship observatory, about eight months ahead of schedule. Roman is now roughly a million miles from Earth, finishing its checkout. Its first pictures are expected in early 2027.
Launch morning, Aug. 30
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Liftoff. Twenty-seven engines light and Falcon Heavy climbs off pad 39A, the same pad that sent Apollo 11 to the Moon.
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Side boosters drop away. Both flip around and fly back to land at Cape Canaveral. The center core is spent on purpose, so every bit of its fuel goes to the telescope.
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Roman flies free. The telescope separates from the upper stage and starts its three-month trip out to its observing spot past the Moon.
Same mirror as Hubble. A far wider view.
Roman’s main mirror is 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) across, exactly the size of Hubble’s. The difference is the camera behind it: a 288-megapixel infrared camera that takes in at least 100 times more sky in a single shot, just as sharp.
Hubble goes deep on one small patch at a time. Roman goes just as deep across areas big enough to map the universe, on the order of a billion galaxies over its mission.
Take a spin around Roman
A short tour of the spacecraft’s main systems, from NASA Goddard.
What it’s looking for
Dark energy. Something is making the universe expand faster and faster, and nobody knows what. By mapping how galaxies cluster and timing thousands of exploding stars, Roman will measure how that push has changed over cosmic history.
Planets nobody can see. Roman will watch the crowded center of the Milky Way for microlensing. When one star drifts in front of another, its gravity briefly magnifies the light behind it, and any planet around it leaves a small blip of its own. It’s the best way to find cold worlds far from their suns, and even rogue planets drifting with no star at all.
Photos of other worlds. Roman’s coronagraph blocks a star’s glare so faint planets right next to it can show up, a test of the technology future missions will need to photograph an Earth-like planet.
Where Roman is now
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Launch. A clean ride to space, then power and communications up.
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First light. The coronagraph saw starlight for the first time, and the guidance system proved it can hold the telescope steady on a target.
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Camera checked out. The team tested the main camera and sharpened the telescope’s focus.
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Final checkout, happening now. NASA says the observatory is fully functional. The team is taking test shots of well-known parts of the sky and fine-tuning image quality. A typical exposure picks up objects about a hundred million times fainter than your eye can see.
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First images. NASA expects to release Roman’s first science pictures.
Meet the Roman Space Telescope
NASA Goddard’s trailer for the mission.
The mother of Hubble
Nancy Grace Roman was NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive post at the agency.
Through the 1960s and ’70s she argued, budget after budget, that astronomers needed a telescope above the atmosphere. That fight became the Hubble Space Telescope, and it’s why she’s remembered as the mother of Hubble.
This mission was called WFIRST until NASA renamed it for her in 2020. It’s run by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center with JPL, Caltech/IPAC and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Images and video: NASA, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA/Joel Kowsky. Cape Kennedy Clothing is an independent brand; NASA does not endorse Cape Kennedy Clothing or any commercial product or service. Mission facts current as of Oct. 26, 2026.
The Nancy Grace Roman shirt
The observatory drawn the way the engineering illustrations show it, mirror, instrument bay and big angled sunshade, laid out as an all-over tropical print.
$69.99
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