NASA launches Roman Space Telescope on Falcon Heavy today
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is blasting off on Sunday, August 30, 2026, at 7:26am local time from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
This $4.3 billion mission will spend the next five to 10 years exploring dark matter and dark energy, those mysterious forces that shape our universe and make it expand.
Infrared survey 1,000x faster, detects exoplanets
Roman is basically Hubble's supercharged cousin, with a camera that scans the sky 1,000 times faster and covers 100 times more area, primarily in infrared.
Its special coronagraph lets scientists spot faint exoplanets by blocking out starlight, which could help us find Earthlike worlds far beyond our solar system.
Roman telescope observations begin December 2026
Named after Nancy Grace Roman (NASA's first chief astronomer), the telescope will map how dark energy and dark matter affect cosmic evolution.
Observations kick off by December 2026, and we'll get the first images in 2027, so stay tuned for some seriously cool space discoveries!