NASA Completes Next-Gen Telescope, And It Could Soon Reveal Whether We're Alone
ScienceAlert••general
Key Points:
- NASA completed the assembly of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope on November 25th at Goddard Space Flight Center, keeping it on track for a possible launch as early as Fall 2026, with a scheduled launch in May 2027 via SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
- The Roman Telescope is an infrared observatory equipped with two main instruments: the Wide-Field Instrument (WFI), offering a view 100 times larger than Hubble’s, and the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI), designed to block starlight to observe exoplanets and their spectra directly.
- Its primary science goals include studying dark energy, conducting an exoplanet census, detecting primordial black holes, and imaging nearby exoplanets, with expectations to discover over
