NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, beginning a three‑month journey to its final orbit at the second Sun‑Earth Lagrange point.

The telescope carries a wide‑field infrared instrument designed to map large areas of sky and investigate dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets, extending beyond its primary goals.

Telemetry was received seven minutes after launch. The Falcon Heavy separated from its center core 31 minutes after liftoff, and its boosters returned to the launch site for refurbishment. Ground teams at Goddard Space Flight Center began monitoring the spacecraft. Communications were first relayed through the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, then through the Madrid and Goldstone complexes to maintain continuous contact as the spacecraft traveled toward L2, about one million miles from Earth.

Solar panels and the lower instrument sun shade were deployed about an hour and 23 minutes after launch. The high‑gain antenna and visor‑like aperture cover will be deployed in the coming days. The Coronagraph Instrument will be powered on to demonstrate technology for imaging Earth‑like planets, and the Wide Field Instrument, a 300‑megapixel infrared camera with 18 4K detectors, will be activated within weeks.

The mission will transmit up to 1.4 terabytes of data per day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and citizen scientists will assist in processing the data. NASA expects to release the first images in early 2027.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the mission was delivered ahead of schedule and on budget, reflecting more than a decade of dedication from the NASA workforce and industry partners. Associate Administrator Nicky Fox said the telescope will be a discovery machine that will bring humanity closer to answering profound questions about cosmic history and will usher in a new era of discovery. Senior project scientist Julie McEnery said the telescope provides eyes unlike any before, enabling new knowledge by this time next year.

The telescope is managed by NASA Goddard with participation from JPL, Caltech/IPAC, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and scientists from multiple institutions, with industrial partners BAE Systems, L3Harris Technologies, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, and contributions from ESA, JAXA, CNES, and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.