About

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was the top large space priority in the report of the Astro2010 Decadal Survey "New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics." NASA will implement the Roman Space Telescope program on a 2.4-meter AFTA (Astrophysics-Focused Telescope Assets) telescope, donated to NASA by another agency.

The design reference mission in the final report of the WFIRST-AFTA Science Definition Team describes an ambitious science program centered on several key science themes. This includes a multi-pronged approach to measuring dark energy, the discovery and census of planets down to sub-Earth masses via their microlensing signatures, and the imaging and spectroscopy of planets via coronagraphy. Moreover, the Roman instruments will enable many exciting new discoveries through a combination of general astrophysics observations and archival studies of Roman data, including data from the core community Roman surveys. The Roman Project is currently planning for observatory launch in late 2026.

A Wider Look

This image shows an incredible, high-resolution view of our nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, as a collection of millions of individual stars. The image was obtained through one of the largest Hubble programs ever carried out, the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury program (PI: J. Dalcanton). To fully observe the dense central region and spiral disk of the galaxy, astronomers took 400 distinct pointings with Hubble (blue square) and connected them to build a wide-field mosaic. The image is now the gold standard for understanding the detailed makeup of galaxies like the Milky Way.

The red outline shows the enormous footprint of Roman superimposed on this Hubble mosaic. It would take just two Roman pointings to cover the entire region explored by Hubble in this mosaic at the same depth and image clarity. Roman's unique ability to do wide-field surveys at space-based resolution will enable a very ambitious science program. This includes a multi-pronged approach to measure the expansion history of the universe, to complement NASA’s Kepler mission by discovering thousands of planets down to sub-Earth masses, and to perform revolutionary studies in stellar and galactic astrophysics. Roman will also have a high performance coronagraph to directly image planets around nearby stars.

The Roman mission is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), and several industrial and foreign partners.