Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launch

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launch

Watch NASA’s newest orbiting observatory launch to space. Our Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to lift off at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 UTC) on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is an observatory. It’s designed to settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics. Roman will have two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration.

It is a $4.3 billion instrument built to confront some of the deepest questions in astrophysics, including why, exactly, the cosmos itself is flying apart at an accelerating rate.

Named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a deep, panoramic view of the cosmos, producing images over 100 times larger than our Hubble Space Telescope. But with the same crisp resolution.

With its wide view and sophisticated host of tools, Roman helps us discover new exoplanets and untangle cosmic mysteries such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

It makes its home in orbit 1 million miles away from Earth at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, where gravitational forces balance to keep objects in steady orbits with very little assistance.

Credit: NASA