Nasa's Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is scheduled to lift off from Florida early on Sunday, 31 August 2026. The $4.3bn telescope will embark on a million-mile journey into deep space from a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center at 7:26am ET, provided there are no late technical issues or adverse weather.
The telescope, named for Nasa's first chief of astronomy, is designed to search for exoplanets and clues about planetary formation. It is expected to join the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, enhancing their output.
The Roman telescope features a 300-megapixel infrared camera, which Nasa states will provide the same sharpness and resolution as Hubble but with a field of view at least 100 times larger. It also includes a coronagraph, a specialised instrument that blocks glare from stars to facilitate detailed photography of planets around them.
Nasa anticipates that the images from Roman will reveal "giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far." The telescope's imagery is expected to become publicly available in early 2027, following months of calibration and tests.
The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will operate at Lagrange point 2, approximately one million miles from Earth, in the same sun-Earth orbit as the James Webb telescope, though they will remain far apart. This launch marks the final flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket.