A New Look Into the Past: The Newest NASA Telescope, Nancy Grace Roman

On August 30, 2026, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched its newest space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), named after NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman. It is currently heading towards an orbit 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth, in the gravitational “sweet spot” known as the second Sun-Earth LaGrange point.

In 1959, Nancy Roman joined the agency, first woman to hold an executive position at the company. She played a pivotal role in turning the company from a small organization to one of the most famous space agencies in the world. Despite receiving backlash and discouragement from her mentors and peer scientists, Roman successfully lobbied Congress to approve funding for the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope. Her contributions led NASA to create a space telescope in her name, leading us to the present day launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The concept of a new telescope was recommended in the 2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey. Six years later, NASA began the process of formally beginning the development process of Roman. Six years after that, it was finally launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman is not merely another telescope; it has an intended purpose of surveying wide-fields of space at high resolution putting it on the same level (if not higher) than Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The origins of Roman are a fascinating representation of the reusability of technology. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which built spy equipment for agencies such as the CIA, also built the optical mirrors necessary for telescopes to observe aspects of the universe. In 1999, the NRO started a multi-billion dollar program called “Future Imaginary Architecture” (FIA) which aimed to design spy satellites to surveil people and Earth from above. The NRO hired Boeing to create the technology. After the attacks of 9/11, the US federal government dumped even more money into the project under stress of foreign invaders and spies. However, delays and budget issues caused the program to fail, wasting billions of dollars. In 2005, the New York Times deemed the project, “perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects." Fortunately, the FIA gifted NASA two 2.4 meter mirrors in 2012 that were used in the satellites. According to Space.com, “[the] optics [were] said to be similar to the Hubble Space Telescope's.” Even though NASA originally approached the donation with skepticism, as the Roman had only recently been proposed, an agreement of the majority in the 2010 National Academy of Science Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey showed Roman to be the top priority for completion in the world of science. The rejected mirrors were subsequently repurposed into crucial pieces for the optical function of the telescope.

In addition to the 2.4m primary mirrors, the telescope also includes secondary mirrors, chronograph instruments, a wide-field instrument, and an outside metal shell that protects the inside technology. As described by Gunter’s Space Page, the wide-field instrument has two channels, “a wide field channel and an integral field unit (IFU) spectrograph channel.” The wide-field channel is comprised of three mirrors and a grism wheel, which is a rotating disk used in astronomical telescopes that has the ability to slide different optical filters into the light path, allowing space and ground telescopes to switch between simple imaging and low/medium resolution slitless spectroscopy (view diagram above). Although a rather convoluted structure, the telescope has the ability to take images in infrared, a type of light with wave length longer than about 750nm that humans can't see. Roman, along with other telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope, uses spectrographs to convert infrared heat into visible light. The IFU channel uses an image slicer and spectrograph to provide, “individual spectra of each 0.15 wide slice covering the 0.6 — 2.0 µm spectral range over a 3.00 × 3.15 arcsec field.” (Gunter’s Space Page) Thus, the IFU channel has the ability to give researchers the individual spectra of each part of the large image, allowing the utmost specificity and in-detail images of any part of the universe. Not only did the development of the Roman represent a significant step forward in NASA’s aeronautical engineering, but the telescope's launch will also catapult our knowledge of outer space through its improved technology.

According to Gunter’s Space Page, “The wide field instrument provides the wide-field imaging and slitless spectroscopic capabilities required to perform the Dark Energy, Exoplanet Microlensing, and NIR surveys while the coronagraph instrument supports the Exoplanet high contrast imaging and spectroscopic science.” Dark energy is the hypothesized form of energy that drives the expansion of the universe. Roman can track thousands of supernovae, and through measuring the brightness of the supernovae and how much their light bends, it can also track how the universe’s expansion changes as time passes, subsequently adding to the knowledge of dark energy. Roman’s wide view assists the study of exoplanets in three different ways: gravitational microlensing, transit detection and direct imaging. Gravitational lensing is a method of determining a planet’s mass and its distance from a host star by analyzing the distortions of space-time created by a star’s gravity when a planet passes by the star. This ripple is quantifiable, allowing astronomers to locate exoplanets on an enlarged scale. Transit detection—the way that most exoplanets have been discovered—is the measurement of when a planet passes by a star while it's orbiting and momentarily blocks the light of the star, signaling to researchers that a planet is orbiting that star. Since exoplanets are miniscule compared to the stars they orbit and the light those host-stars emit, direct imaging has always been difficult as researchers often can't record a large enough blockage of light to pinpoint an exoplanet. Additionally, despite the difficulty of acquiring images of exoplanets, Roman’s combination of ultra precise data capturing and wide scope enables the discovery of exoplanets through direct imaging on another level. Now, telescopes can take pictures of actual exoplanets and conduct direct research from the image. Roman’s placement also plays a significant role in its ability to capture clear images of the universe from a point close to Earth. Facing away from the sun, it blocks out any solar light, only collecting data from an unobstructed viewpoint.

The Roman telescope doesn’t just give the scientific community cool pictures of nearby nebulae or stars, it enables the discovery of new earth-like exoplanets and provides more information about the elusive existence of black energy. From a failed spy satellite mirror to the newest scientific advancement launched into space able to capture 100x that of the Hubble space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is the next look into the universe and the worlds beyond our own.