NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is attached to a Falcon Heavy rocket and scheduled to launch on August 31, 2026, from Kennedy Space Center.

The mission follows a 2010 National Academies Decadal Survey recommendation for a wide‑field infrared survey telescope, originally called WFIRST, and was upgraded in 2015 using a 2.4‑meter optical system donated by the National Reconnaissance Office. The telescope passed its critical design review in September 2021, completed spacecraft integration in 2024‑2025, and arrived at Kennedy Space Center in July 2026.

The observatory will operate at the Sun‑Earth L2 Lagrange point alongside the James Webb Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Euclid observatory. Its five‑year primary mission allocates 75 % of observing time to three core community surveys: the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey, the High‑Latitude Time Domain Survey, and the High‑Latitude Wide Area Survey. The Galactic Bulge survey will use microlensing to detect exoplanets, including free‑floating planets, and to study stellar masses and black holes. The High‑Latitude Time Domain Survey will monitor type Ia supernovae and other transient events to improve constraints on the universe’s expansion and dark energy. The High‑Latitude Wide Area Survey will map millions of galaxies to study large‑scale structure and dark matter. The Wide Field Instrument contains 18 H4RG detectors with more than 300 million pixels and uses a filter wheel for imaging and spectroscopy, while the Coronagraph Instrument will demonstrate high‑contrast imaging for exoplanet detection. The mission is designed to be serviceable and has enough fuel for roughly a decade.

Launch is set for 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 31, 2026, and will be streamed live on NASA’s YouTube channel. The mission continues a series of flagship astrophysics missions that began with the James Webb Space Telescope’s 2021 launch and aims to expand exoplanet catalogs and refine cosmological models.