From Spy Satellite to Space Telescope: How Roman’s Wide‑Field Vision Could Change Astronomy

NASA is preparing to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a $4.3 billion mission scheduled for 30 August from Florida on a SpaceX launch vehicle. The observatory is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who is often called the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The telescope’s origin is unusual. About fifteen years ago an American intelligence agency offered NASA a satellite that it no longer needed. Engineers repurposed the hardware for astronomy, pointing it toward the stars instead of Earth. The result is a telescope that can image the universe with the same sharpness as Hubble but over a far larger field of view.

According to scientist Julie McEnery, Roman will be able to map the entire Milky Way in just one month – a task that would take Hubble roughly a hundred years to complete.

Scientists hope Roman will shed light on dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe. The mission will also catalogue billions of galaxies and hunt for new exoplanets by using gravitational lensing, a phenomenon first described by Albert Einstein in 1936. The observatory is planned to operate for five years, and all of its data will be released to the public for free.

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