Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Roman is the next NASA flagship space telescope after JWST. Its primary mirror is the same 2.4 m diameter as Hubble's — donated by the National Reconnaissance Office — but its detector array is one hundred times wider, giving it Hubble-class sharpness across a patch of sky big enough to map structure on cosmological scales.

Two instruments share the focal plane: the Wide Field Instrument, an infrared survey camera designed to image hundreds of millions of galaxies and detect tens of thousands of microlensing exoplanets, and the Coronagraph Instrument, a technology demonstration aimed at imaging gas giants and dusty disks around nearby stars.

Roman is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first Chief Astronomer and the scientist often called the 'Mother of Hubble' for the lobbying and architecture work that made a space telescope program possible at all. The mission is targeting launch in late 2026 to early 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center, with a five-year primary survey at the Sun–Earth L2 point.