NASA targets a September launch for its next big space telescope
Engadget • • general
Key Points:
- NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as early as September this year, with a final deadline set for May 2027, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
- The Roman Space Telescope features a field of view 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, despite having a similarly sized mirror.
- Named after NASA's first chief astronomer, the telescope aims to scan large sections of the sky to discover new transient objects and possibly entirely new classes of cosmic phenomena.
- Roman will operate nearly 1 million miles from Earth, equipped with a 300.8-megapixel camera covering visible to near-infrared light and a high-contrast coronagraph to image exoplanets otherwise obscured by starlight.
- It is designed to complement other NASA observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory by identifying objects that those telescopes can then study in greater detail.
