The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center on August 30, 2026, beginning a mission to study exoplanets and the distribution of dark matter and dark energy.

Named after NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman, the telescope will travel to the Sun‑Earth Lagrange point L2, about one million miles from Earth, joining the James Webb Space Telescope, the European Euclid mission, and Gaia. The Wide Field Instrument will conduct surveys of the sky, while a coronagraph will enable detailed study of exoplanets by blocking starlight.

The launch was successful, and the spacecraft entered a 90‑day commissioning phase. NASA projects daily data transmission of 1.4 terabytes, surpassing the James Webb Space Telescope’s 50‑60 gigabytes per day. Its field of view is about 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope and its scan rate is roughly 1,000 times faster. The mission is expected to identify billions of stars and thousands of exoplanets, with the coronagraph providing higher‑resolution observations than previous instruments.

The program cost $4.3 billion for the five‑year operational period, and NASA reports it remains within budget despite launching nine months early. The Trump administration proposed reductions to NASA’s science budget for fiscal year 2027, from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion, but Congress allocated $6 billion. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman noted that the mission reflects a “new Golden Age of discovery” and thanked President Trump for his support.

Roman is designed for a minimum of ten years of operation, with potential for extension, and its coronagraph will allow detailed study of exoplanet atmospheres in the search for biosignatures.