NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, beginning a roughly three-month journey to study dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Aug. 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, beginning a roughly three-month journey to the Sun-Earth L2 point, per NASA and Space.com.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Aug. 30, 2026, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission, more than a decade and about $4 billion in development per Space.com, will study dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets. Its Wide Field Instrument captures views roughly 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope in a single shot, and NASA says its largest images will contain about a trillion pixels, with the telescope sending back roughly 1.4 terabytes of data daily - the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission so far. Roman is now on a roughly 90-day, one-million-mile journey to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), with first images expected in early 2027. Sources: NASA, Space.com.