08/30/2026
Congratulations to everyone at NASA and affiliated organizations for a successful launch of the next great space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.
The telescope is on its way now to Lagrange point 2 (L2) which is the same gravitational location as the James Webb Space Telescope.
Roman will be a telescope that will hunt for signs of dark matter and energy, look for exoplanets around distant stars, and while also operating in the infrared like Webb, will do so over a much broader field of view than both Webb and Hubble. This will allow for more repeated comparisons over time of various targets in the sky. What Roman can do in about a month would take Hubble a century to achieve.
While Roman’s mirror is similar in size to Hubble, its field of view is 20x larger, and can retask faster, allowing for more captures per day. Webb is more focused on smaller field of view and has more detail in its camera sensor. Roman will take larger surveys of wider area of sky, allowing for more opportunities for research.
Roman will push down nearly 1.5 terabytes of data daily, whereas Webb sends down about 60GB per day, and compare that to Hubble’s 3GB of data per day.
Roman will take about 3 months to arrive at L2 and will immediately begin sending back data for not only professional scientists, but citizen scientists as well.
