NASA is set to launch its next-generation space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, on the 30th. The telescope expands the field of view—long considered the Hubble Space Telescope’s greatest weakness during its 36 years as the astronomical community’s workhorse observatory—by a factor of 100, and is expected to mark a transformative turning point in direct exoplanet imaging and dark energy research.
NASA finalized and announced the Roman Space Telescope’s launch plan last week. Liftoff is scheduled for 7:36 a.m. Eastern Time on the 30th from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The telescope will be carried in the payload bay of a SpaceX rocket and deployed to a position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
Measuring 12 meters in length and 4 meters in width, the Roman Space Telescope has cost approximately $3 billion (about 4.2 trillion won) to develop and build. NASA projects the telescope’s maximum lifespan at 10 years.
Filling Hubble’s Weakness with a ‘100x Field of View’
The Roman Space Telescope’s most distinctive feature is a field of view 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope. This means the Roman Space Telescope can capture in a single exposure an area of sky that would require Hubble to take 100 separate images.
Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has played a pivotal role in extending humanity’s vision beyond the solar system, capturing millions of celestial images. However, its narrow camera field of view meant observing the vast universe required extensive time.
Despite the wider field of view, image quality remains unchanged. This is because the primary mirror diameter—which determines image resolution—is identical at 2.4 meters for both the Roman and Hubble telescopes. Some past space telescopes offered wide-angle imaging but suffered from degraded image quality. The Roman Space Telescope effectively secures both a wide field of view and high image quality simultaneously.
The telescope’s name honors an individual: Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018), who in 1959 became the first woman to hold a senior executive position at NASA as the inaugural Chief of Astronomy. Her greatest achievement was conceiving the Hubble Space Telescope program. In the 1970s, she proposed the idea of launching a telescope beyond Earth’s atmosphere, then persuaded the U.S. Congress to secure funding—leading to Hubble’s launch in 1990. The new space telescope bearing her name now addresses the very weakness of the Hubble telescope she championed into orbit during her lifetime.
Ushering in the Era of Direct Exoplanet Imaging
Another key instrument aboard the Roman Space Telescope is the coronagraph. A coronagraph is a light-blocking mask that obscures bright starlight entering the telescope’s camera angle, enabling observation of exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. It functions much like raising a hand to block headlights when trying to spot an insect flying in front of a parked car at night.
Coronagraphs have been installed on other space telescopes before, but NASA says the coronagraph aboard the Roman Space Telescope offers up to 1,000 times the performance of previous instruments—meaning it can block starlight far more effectively.
To date, scientists have announced the discovery of roughly 6,000 exoplanets, but most have been confirmed indirectly through gravitational analysis or light measurements. Only a few dozen planets—those large and hot enough to be easily identifiable—have actually been photographed by cameras. NASA envisions the Roman Space Telescope ushering in an era of direct exoplanet imaging.
NASA explained that directly imaging planets will also enable analysis of their atmospheric composition, allowing scientists to gauge the possibility of extraterrestrial life based on the presence of oxygen and methane.
Dark Energy and a Billion-Galaxy Survey
Beyond exoplanet observation, the Roman Space Telescope will be used to study dark energy and dark matter—phenomena that exist in the universe but whose nature remains unknown. It will also undertake a mission to observe more than one billion galaxies.
Building on the observational legacy Hubble has accumulated over 36 years, the Roman Space Telescope is expected to significantly broaden the horizons of astronomical research through its wider field of view and enhanced light-blocking technology.