NASA has completed the construction of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope that will soon change how we view the universe. The agency announced on Thursday that the telescope’s assembly was complete at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, marking a major step toward key phases of testing. NASA says the telescope will be moved to its launch site at Kennedy Space Center after tests, and it’s on track to launch as early as fall 2026.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Roman just came together in one! The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has finished final integration at the @NASAGoddard Space Flight Center.
Learn more about this historic milestone: https://t.co/KnOqjxoWEX
1/2 pic.twitter.com/DXGzJBauJ6
— Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (@NASARoman) December 4, 2025
The Roman telescope, named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, measures over 42 feet (12.7 meters) long and carries a primary mirror 2.4-meters in diameter. Despite weighing 80% lighter than Hubble telescope’s primary mirror, Roman’s will offer a field of view 100 times larger.
Here’s all you need to know about this game-changing observatory.
NASA’s powerful new eye on the universe
The Roman telescope is designed to answer fundamental questions about the dark universe, how common planetary systems like ours are and how many planets have potential to harbour life. The Roman telescope has a five-year primary mission and 75% of its operation will focus on conducting three surveys.
First is the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey to trace the evolution of the universe in order to probe dark matter. Dark matter and dark energy, which together form the dark universe, is believed to make up 95% of the known universe but they’re detectable only by their effects on observable matter. NASA says the Roman telescope will combine the powers of imaging and spectroscopy to discover more than a billion galaxies across a vast swath of space. It will observe a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full Moon.
Scientists expect that Roman will discover 100 billion stars, 80,000 supernovae (exploding stars), hundreds of forming planetary systems and more than 1,00,000 exoplanets. Roman is carrying two main instruments – the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument. The Wide Field Instrument’s 288-megapixel camera will unveil the cosmos all the way from our solar system to near the edge of the observable universe, whereas the Coronagraph will carry out direct imaging of exoplanets by blocking the glare of stars they orbit.
The second called the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will observe the same region multiple times to notice changes in celestial objects over time. This survey will help study dark energy which scientists believe is accelerating the universe’s expansion.
The third survey is the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey for the Milky Way. Roman will track hundreds of millions of stars in the heart of our galaxy in search of microlensing event – a phenomenon where the gravity of a foreground star briefly bends and magnifies the light of a background star. This process could reveal large exoplanets with orbits bigger than Earth’s around the Sun. Microlensing may also unveil rogue planets that are not bound to a star along with isolated black holes.
“With Roman now standing as a complete observatory, which keeps the mission on track for a potentially early launch, we are a major step closer to understanding the universe as never before,” Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. The Roman telescope will be installed 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth at the second Earth-Sun Lagrange Point. It is the same spot where the James Webb Space Telescope is parked. Both telescopes are designed to gather infrared light, allowing them to peer deep into space, even through thick clouds of dust and gas.
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