On 30 August 2026, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Liftoff occurred at 13:26 CEST. With the telescope now on its way, one of NASA's most ambitious missions in recent years has begun — a survey of the sky in visible and near-infrared light designed to help reveal the nature of dark energy and dark matter, and to investigate the true diversity of exoplanets in our galaxy.
What's on board
Roman is a NASA-led mission with significant contributions from the European Space Agency. ESA provided star trackers, batteries, and detectors for the coronagraph instrument — a device that blocks a star's light to reveal faint objects nearby, such as planets. Beyond hardware, ESA will support communications through its deep-space ground station network and enable data download using a new 35-meter antenna in New Norcia, Australia.
"I warmly congratulate our colleagues at NASA on the successful launch of Roman," says Carole Mundell, ESA's Director of Science. "ESA is proud to have provided essential hardware and to continue supporting Roman's ambitious scientific goals. Together, we are opening new windows on the cosmos."
Roman's primary mirror measures 2.4 meters in diameter — the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope's. It carries two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and a Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration. With its panoramic view of the sky, crisp infrared vision, and quick re-orientation ability, Roman will perform fast and efficient surveys of large areas of sky.
Hunting dark energy and cataloguing exoplanets
Roman's main scientific goal is to track how galaxy clusters are distributed and change across space and time, and to capture light from thousands of distant type Ia supernovas. These observations will help astronomers pin down how the Universe has expanded over billions of years, and determine whether dark energy — the force accelerating that expansion — remains constant or evolves over time.
Roman should provide our clearest picture yet of whether dark energy is truly constant or whether it evolves over cosmic time — either outcome would have profound implications for our understanding of the Universe. I'm also excited by Roman's exoplanet census, which will discover thousands of new worlds, including cold planets and free-floating planets that have remained largely beyond our reach until now. Perhaps what excites me most is the unexpected — with its unprecedented combination of depth, area, and image quality, Roman has every opportunity to surprise us.Bethan James, ESA Roman Project Scientist
Beyond cosmology, Roman will conduct a census of exoplanets across our galaxy, focusing especially on types that are difficult to detect otherwise: cold planets orbiting far from their stars, and free-floating planets that don't orbit any star at all. This catalogue will complement work by ESA's Euclid mission, which also studies dark energy and dark matter but using different methods.
The road to L2 and what comes next
After launch, Roman is heading to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), a region of space nearly 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. This location gives the telescope an unobstructed view of a wide swath of sky — roughly 12% of the entire celestial sphere. Like Euclid and the James Webb Space Telescope, Roman will not sit exactly at L2 but will orbit it in a wide loop, much larger than the Moon's orbit around Earth.
Over the next three months, the mission team will carry out a carefully orchestrated series of deployments, calibrations, and tests. Only once this commissioning period is complete will science operations begin, starting with the release of the first science images. The mission is designed to run for at least five years, with the telescope built to potentially operate for another five — up to ten years in total.
