Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
You scanned the shirt
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
The observatory printed on your shirt is real, it is finished, and it is about to fly. Here is what it is and what it is going to do.
Launch
Targeting 30 August 2026 — SpaceX Falcon Heavy, from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. The same pad that sent Apollo 11 to the Moon.
A Hubble-class mirror with a hundred times the view
Roman carries a primary mirror 2.4 metres (7.9 feet) across — exactly the same diameter as Hubble's. What changed is the camera behind it. Roman's Wide Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel near-infrared camera whose field of view is at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, at comparable image quality.
That is the whole idea. Hubble can look extraordinarily deep at one small patch of sky at a time. Roman sees the same depth across a patch big enough to survey. Over its mission it is expected to gather light from something on the order of a billion galaxies.
Where it goes
Roman will operate from a quasi-halo orbit around the second Sun–Earth Lagrange point, L2 — the gravitationally quiet spot roughly 1.5 million kilometres beyond Earth, on the night side, where the Sun, Earth and Moon all sit in the same direction and can be blocked with a single shade. It is the same neighbourhood the James Webb Space Telescope works from.
Its primary mission is five years, and it has been designed so that a five-year extension is possible — fuel is the only expendable aboard.
What it is looking for
- Dark energy and dark matter. By mapping how galaxies cluster and by measuring thousands of Type Ia supernovae, Roman will test how the expansion of the universe has changed over cosmic time.
- A census of planets. Staring at the crowded core of our own galaxy, Roman will catch microlensing events — the brief brightening that happens when one star drifts in front of another and its gravity focuses the light. Planets around the foreground star leave their own signature in that flash. It is the one method that finds worlds far from their stars, and even worlds bound to no star at all.
- Direct imaging. The Coronagraph Instrument is a technology demonstration: a system of optics, masks, self-flexing mirrors and sensors built to suppress the glare of a star enough to photograph the planets and debris disks orbiting it. What it proves out here is what future missions will need to image an Earth-like planet.
Who Nancy Grace Roman was
Nancy Grace Roman was NASA's first Chief of Astronomy — the first woman to hold an executive position at the agency. She spent years arguing, budget cycle after budget cycle, that astronomers should be given a telescope above the atmosphere. That argument became the Hubble Space Telescope, which is why she is known as the mother of Hubble.
The mission was formerly called WFIRST. NASA renamed it for her in 2020.
Roman is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, with participation from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech/IPAC and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
The shirt
Our Nancy Grace Roman Telescope Hawaiian shirt draws the observatory the way the engineering illustrations do — the mirror assembly, the instrument bay, the outer barrel and that big angled sunshade — and lays it out as a repeating tropical print. Aerospace hardware, worn like a shirt should be worn.
Imagery credit NASA / NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab. Cape Kennedy Clothing is an independent brand; NASA does not endorse Cape Kennedy Clothing or any commercial product or service. Mission facts are drawn from NASA's public mission material and were accurate as of 18 August 2026 — launch dates move.