![\"Isaacman](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/isaacman-phone.jpeg\")
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman holds a phone during an Aug. 30 briefing about the Roman Space Telescope launch. President Trump was on the line congratulating NASA on the launch. Credit: SpaceNews\/Jeff Foust<\/p>\nUpdated 11:15 a.m. Eastern with postlaunch press conference comments.<\/p>\n
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 A Falcon Heavy launched NASA\u2019s newest flagship telescope Aug. 30 on a mission to study the nature of the universe and discover thousands of exoplanets.<\/p>\n
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifted off from Kennedy Space Center\u2019s Launch Complex 39A at 7:26 a.m. Eastern. The rocket\u2019s payload, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, deployed from the upper stage 31 minutes later. The rocket\u2019s two side boosters landed at separate pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, while the central booster was expended.<\/p>\n
This was the 13th launch of the Falcon Heavy, dating back to its debut in 2018. It was the third NASA mission for the rocket, after the launch of the Psyche asteroid mission in October 2023 and the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter a year later.<\/p>\n
Roman will spend the next 100 days traveling to the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. During that journey, engineers will be commissioning the 9,200-kilogram spacecraft and its instruments.<\/p>\n
That work will begin within an hour of deployment, with deployment of the spacecraft\u2019s solar arrays and sunshield. A course-correction burn is planned a day after launch and a second three days later, but Jackie Townsend, Roman\u2019s project manager, said at an Aug. 29 briefing that, depending on the accuracy of the launch, the first maneuver could be reduced and the second skipped entirely.<\/p>\n
She confirmed at a press conference two hours after liftoff that the launch went as planned and that Roman was operating well. \u201cThe ride was magnificent and put us right where we wanted to be,\u201d she said, but added it was too early to know how that would affect plans for upcoming course-correction maneuvers.<\/p>\n
The first 10 days of commissioning will be devoted to spacecraft deployments and outgassing, she said. The following 30 days will be focused on commissioning the spacecraft, \u201cmaking sure that all of the infrastructure parts of the bird are doing their jobs properly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another 45 days will be devoted to commissioning the spacecraft\u2019s instruments. At the 90-day mark after launch, she said Roman should be ready \u201cto power into our early science operations.\u201d<\/p>\n
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman holds a phone during an Aug. 30 briefing about the Roman Space Telescope launch. President Trump was on the line congratulating NASA on the launch. Credit: SpaceNews\/Jeff Foust<\/p>\n
Presidential phone call<\/p>\n
During the postlaunch press conference, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman received a call and stepped out of the room briefly. He returned a minute later and said he had President Donald Trump on the phone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just want to thank everybody, congratulate you. It looked beautiful on television,\u201d Trump said, adding he called to see if there was \u201canything negative\u201d about the launch he needed to know about. \u201cIt was another great success.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re the hottest in space,\u201d he said later. \u201cLet\u2019s keep it all going. Congratulations.\u201d<\/p>\n
The praise from the president, though, contrasted with past actions by the administration regarding Roman. In his first term, three consecutive NASA budget requests, from fiscal years 2019 through 2021, proposed canceling WFIRST<\/a>. In all three cases, Congress rejected the proposal and appropriated full funding for the mission.<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA also proposed a significant cut for Roman<\/a> after a \u201cpassback\u201d document from the Office of Management and Budget again targeted the mission for cancellation<\/a>, despite the fact the spacecraft was nearly complete and ahead of schedule. Congress again fully funded Roman.<\/p>\n Asked about what changed between the administration\u2019s past budget proposals and the president\u2019s current praise for the mission, Isaacman emphasized the support from Trump. \u201cThe President of the United States is excited about our next great exploration asset that\u2019s underway,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a great moment for the nation. It\u2019s a great moment certainly for NASA to have a president so interested in our space program.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m incredibly grateful for his support, the space policy, the resources,\u201d he said. \u201cIt sounds like from that call maybe even more resources.\u201d<\/p>\n Discovering what the universe is made of<\/p>\n The $4.3 billion Roman is NASA\u2019s latest flagship space telescope, with a five-year prime mission but enough propellant to operate in a halo orbit around the L-2 point for at least 10 years.<\/p>\n Roman\u2019s main science instrument is the Wide-Field Imager, a 300-megapixel camera. It will be used primarily for several surveys planned by astronomers for the telescope\u2019s five-year prime mission.<\/p>\n Roman has a field of view 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope and can shift fields more quickly. \u201cWe can survey the sky more than 1,000 times faster than Hubble,\u201d said Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, at an Aug. 29 briefing. \u201cA survey that would take Roman a month would take a century for Hubble.\u201d<\/p>\n That will allow Roman to tackle \u201centirely new, ambitious science questions,\u201d she said. That includes a focus on understanding dark energy and dark matter, which combined comprise about 95% of the universe but remain largely mysterious to astronomers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re about to discover what the universe is made of,\u201d said Lucas Paganini, Roman telescope program executive at NASA Headquarters.<\/p>\n A key area of interest is growing evidence that the cosmological standard model of the universe may not be accurate. One possibility is that a factor called the cosmological constant, linked to dark energy, may not be constant over the history of the universe.<\/p>\n \u201cThat means that the properties of dark energy may change as the universe expands,\u201d McEnery said. \u201cIt could mean that we need to revisit how gravity itself works, that maybe our understanding of how gravity works on very, very large scales is, in fact, not very well described by general relativity.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I\u2019m sure of is that Roman\u2019s observations are going to definitively address at least some of those questions,\u201d McEnery said, \u201cbecause it will definitively say the model works or it doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n Roman\u2019s surveys, beyond addressing cosmological studies, will provide a wealth of data for astronomers. That includes observations of 20 billion stars in the Milky Way and 2 billion galaxies. Astronomers expect to detect 100,000 exoplanets, about 40 times the number currently known. \u201cThink of this as the largest census we\u2019ve ever done of other planets in our galaxy,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Roman will generate up to 1.4 terabytes of data per day, downlinked to dedicated ground stations in New Mexico, Australia and Japan. The data will be made publicly available through a cloud-based system shortly after it is received, with no proprietary periods for astronomers who have been working on the mission.<\/p>\n Roman carries a second instrument, a coronagraph. It is designed to precisely block light from an individual star, revealing any planets or dust disks around it.<\/p>\n Trying to observe an exoplanet around a star is like detecting a firefly next to a lighthouse from hundreds of kilometers away, said Vanessa Bailey, Roman Coronagraph Instrument scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.<\/p>\n Coronagraphs used today allow the detection of exoplanets a million times fainter than their star, she said, but an Earth-like exoplanet would be 10 billion times fainter. \u201cThat\u2019s too great of a leap in a single generation of instrumentation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Roman\u2019s coronagraph, using active deformable mirrors, will try to bridge that gap, detecting exoplanets 100 million times fainter than their stars. That would enable detections of planets similar to Jupiter.<\/p>\n The coronagraph is a technology demonstration with 2,000 hours of observing time over Roman\u2019s first 18 months. \u201cWe\u2019ll interleave our observations with those of the various surveys,\u201d Bailey said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to try to push as hard as we can as fast as we can to understand what the instrument and the observatory are capable of,\u201d she said, \u201cand then plan an ambitious portfolio for the remainder of the 2,000 hours after that.\u201d<\/p>\n McEnery noted that the telescope\u2019s namesake, Nancy Grace Roman, was a proponent of space telescopes. She published a journal paper in 1959 that examined the potential of directly observing planets with such an observatory but concluded it was impossible given the state of technology at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cIf she was here now,\u201d McEnery said, \u201cshe would really enjoy having been proved wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Updated 11:15 a.m. Eastern with postlaunch press conference comments. 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